


To Give Birth to a Dancing Star

by Philosopher_King



Series: Chaos Avatar Zuko [2]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Chaos Avatar Zuko, Depression, Gen, Injury Recovery, Medicinal Drug Use, Nightmares, Past Child Abuse, Philosophy, Trauma, Vomiting, Yes Zuko swears, Zuko (Avatar)-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25285687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: Sailing near the North Pole at the summer solstice, a few months after his banishment, Zuko finds his way to the Tree of Time in the Spirit World where Vaatu is imprisoned. Vaatu promises to help him find Raava's Avatar if Zuko frees him... which he can only do by merging his spirit with Vaatu's, becoming an Avatar of chaos. But before Vaatu will tell him where Raava is, he says, Zuko must learn to bend the other elements, to become a match for the other Avatar.
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Raava & Vaatu (Avatar), The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar), Vaatu & Zuko (Avatar), Zuko & Zuko's Crew (Avatar)
Series: Chaos Avatar Zuko [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753936
Comments: 276
Kudos: 870
Collections: Best of Avatar: The Last Airbender





	1. The Spirit in the Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The One Where Zuko's Hair Matches Sokka's and Other Tales](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21632206) by [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/pseuds/MuffinLance). 
  * Inspired by [Consider The Wildflowers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22050730) by [AvocadoLove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvocadoLove/pseuds/AvocadoLove). 



> This fic was inspired by MuffinLance's idea for a Chaos Avatar Zuko AU, which she is generously lending out to other writers. I was also inspired to do a take on it by AvocadoLove's [Consider the Wildflowers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22050730/chapters/52625371#workskin), which inevitably deals with some of the same ideas... but I hope I've addressed them in a mostly original way.
> 
> I wrote a long-ish prologue thingy for this AU (the first fic in the series), which is not necessary for understanding what's going on, but does provide additional context and will give certain things a different significance.
> 
> I feel kind of terrible about the title. Yes, I am a professional Nietzsche scholar, who gets paid to publish research about Nietzsche and teach Nietzsche (and Hegel, blargh) to university students, so if anyone has a good excuse for this title it's me... but I hate that it's one of those clichéd Nietzsche quotes that you see floating around the internet without context. (I also kind of hated myself when I titled a fic "The Abyss Gazes Also," but I excused it as partly a reference to that one chapter of Alan Moore's _Watchmen_. Most of the time when I title fics with Nietzsche quotes, it's the deep cuts.) But I really couldn't think of a better title for this idea, so...
> 
> The line, "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star," is from _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ , Zarathustra's Prologue, section 5, where he describes "the last man" -- which is extremely relevant to the way I'm using it here.

Zuko lit four candles on the altar in his cabin and sat half-lotus on the bench in front of it to meditate, as his uncle had taught him, as he had done every evening for the past three months aboard the _Wani_. Or rather, it should have been evening, but so near the North Pole at the summer solstice, the sun never quite set, but hovered at the edge of the horizon even at midnight.

Zuko had sailed toward the North Pole after finding no airbenders, and no Avatar, at either the Western or the Northern Air Temples. At the Western Temple he and his crew had found nothing but bones—the bones of the Air Nomads killed by Fire Lord Sozin’s forces, and the bones of the firebenders who had fallen during the attack. At Uncle Iroh’s insistence, he, Zuko, and the other firebenders on their crew had burned all the bodies to ash, as they would for any honorable dead of the Fire Nation—the Air Nomads’ bodies, too, not only the Fire Nation soldiers. They had no urns for the ashes, and they had no way of finding out who the soldiers’ families were (if they had surviving families) or sending their ashes home. So with a prayer to Agni and to their spirits for forgiveness, they scattered all the ashes into the Western Sea. Perhaps they would find a way home after all, if the winds and the tides were kind.

Near the Northern Air Temple they had heard tantalizing rumors of people flying on woven wings— _Airbenders with their gliders?_ , Zuko wondered eagerly, while his uncle shook his head and said it could not be. Zuko had berated him for despairing so soon… but Iroh was right, in the end: they were not airbenders, but Earth Kingdom refugees who had built ingenious gliding machines to catch the winds that whistled around the mountain peaks.

Iroh was enchanted with the machines and asked the mechanist question after question about how they worked, while Zuko only wanted to know if he had ever met any airbenders, and if not, where they might have gone. The poor terrified man stammered that he was helping the Fire Nation build a great flying machine for their war, that he had no loyalties but to them and the people he protected… But Zuko had already stopped caring what he was up to when he said he had never met a living airbender, and Iroh only wanted to understand the principles behind the machine he was designing. “Magnificent! Magnificent!” he kept murmuring while the man explained, and Zuko wandered around the halls looking at the frescoes of Air Nomads and flying bison, cracked and faded and obscured by a forest of belching pipes. They told him nothing new. There was nothing here—nothing that mattered. Iroh thanked the mechanist for his time and they left.

The Eastern Air Temple was far away, south down the coast of the Earth Kingdom past Chameleon Bay. While they were so close to the North Pole, Zuko thought they should look there—perhaps for the Avatar’s waterbending teacher (who, Iroh reminded him, would probably have been even older than the Avatar, who would be over one hundred years old if he still lived); perhaps for the new Avatar, if the last airbender had died. The cycle predicted that the next Water Tribe Avatar should have been born in the Southern Tribe, but Fire Lord Azulon had found and imprisoned all the Southern waterbenders, and none of them had started bending any other elements when kept away from water. It was possible, though, that the Water Tribe Avatar had been born into the Northern Tribe twice in a row. It had happened before; the Northern Tribe was far more populous than the Southern, and had been even before the Southern Tribe had lost so many sailors and benders to the war.

Despite the short distance as the crow (or bison) flies between the Northern Air Temple and the North Pole, it was slow sailing. The water was treacherous with rocks, ice floes, and icebergs whose sharp peaks looked dangerous enough, though their true danger was the great masses hidden beneath the waves. They had to navigate carefully, sending a plumb line over the side several times a day to feel for invisible mountains of ice that could easily gouge open the _Wani_ ’s hull.

Zuko struggled to sleep here: his body’s instinct was to be alert whenever the sun was above the horizon, to rest only when its light was gone from the sky—the firebender’s instinct that had developed among a people who lived their whole lives near the equator, but served them poorly so far from their home latitudes. Meditating helped with that, helped calm his mind and bank his inner fire so that he could find at least a few hours of sleep even when sunlight was ever-present.

But he had taken up the practice for other reasons—in the first instance, because his uncle had promised him that if he learned to control his breathing and master its connection with his chi, he could someday breathe fire in the way that had earned Iroh the moniker ‘the Dragon of the West.’ But there were other, nearer-term purposes for his meditation practice. Since the Agni Kai at which he had dishonored himself with his cowardice and his father had punished him for it, pain was as ever-present as daylight at the polar solstice. The bandaging had come off after three weeks—the ship’s doctor, Tulang, insisted that the healing wounds needed exposure to the air, now that they were no longer open and susceptible to infection—but the flesh was still raw and tender, the just-forming scar red and angry-looking. Zuko asked the doctor whether the color would fade to pale pink or white, like the old scars on his legs and arms from scrapes and accidents in training with fire or swords. Tulang could say only that time would tell.

Meditation did not exactly dull the pain, but it worked much like opium in that it helped him mind it less. He learned to notice its fluctuations, its precise qualities, the sensations of which it was composed: the prickle of air currents over exposed nerve endings, the itchy tightness of new scar tissue stretched over too much area; sometimes he even thought he could feel the slow crawling sensation of the flesh working to patch itself over. Uncle Iroh told him that in meditation, he could accept the presence of pain and sit with it, as an uninvited companion but not a foe. _Pain is not my enemy; it is my teacher,_ Zuko had replied, recalling his father’s words. Uncle Iroh had looked at him sadly and said, _Pain can teach you patience and perseverance, or it can teach you fear, but it cannot teach you respect. Do not mistake for respect what is in fact only fear._

With the aid of meditation, Zuko had been able to stop taking tincture of opium a month after he was burned, avoiding the dependency he and his uncle both dreaded. Well, with meditation and other remedies that Iroh sought eagerly by speaking with the local herbalists and wisewomen of the towns of the northwestern Earth Kingdom where they stopped for news and supplies. In addition to willow bark tea, which still tasted foul (and their store of honey was one of the things they needed to replenish in those towns), Uncle Iroh forced him, with Tulang’s grudging approval, to drink tea once a day made from the leaves of the _birch_ tree, which did not grow in the Fire Nation, and which was even more disgusting than willow bark. Zuko was now thoroughly sick of eating cherries, which some ancient hedge witch swore could ease pain and reduce swelling (and possibly improve sexual performance, though that was _not_ something Zuko wanted to think about).

Uncle Iroh’s latest find, in the rainy mountains just northeast of Pohuai Stronghold, was a type of sage recommended by an old woman living alone (save for her cat) at an ‘Herbalist Institute’ atop a mountain above a deserted village. _Diviners’ sage_ , she called it. Tulang had examined it, sniffed it suspiciously, bit off part of a leaf and chewed it with a look of intent concentration, then shrugged and said it almost certainly wasn’t poisonous, but also probably wasn’t good for much except as a fairly dull seasoning for food. The old woman had _tsk_ ed at him and insisted that chewing the leaves or drinking an infusion of their juice could help clear and focus the mind and detach it from preoccupation with the ills of the body.

Indeed, sometimes it seemed to detach Zuko’s mind from his body altogether, which was disorienting and a little frightening at first, but could also be liberating, when it made him feel as if his body—wounded and scarred, marked with his failure, clumsy and incompetent with the element he was unworthy to rule—was not, after all, part of him, but a shell he could cast off and look down on with pity. Sometimes it turned the candles, their flames swelling and diminishing with his breath, into dancing, many-colored starbursts, like the fireworks shows or illusion-enhanced displays of virtuosic bending at the Fire Festival. Sometimes he could see faraway places in the flames—real places or imagined, he did not know. This one looked like paintings of the Earth King’s palace in Ba Sing Se, that one like the fabled mountain city of Omashu; and what was that gigantic banyan-grove tree that looked like it could be the center of the world, with its roots reaching out for miles below the earth? Were these places where destiny waited for him? Would one of them be where he found the Avatar?

On the still-sunlit evening of the solstice, after a long sleep-deprived week of crawling through the polar ice, Zuko drank the nasty birch tea, chewed the (somewhat less nasty) sage leaves, and lit four candles: one for each of the cardinal directions, his uncle told him, and for each of the four elements. He breathed slowly and deeply, a count of five in (five for the four elements and spirit, said Uncle Iroh, or for the four limbs of the body and the head) and another five out, and watched the candle flames wax and wane. He counted the number of his breaths as well as their duration: twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

As suddenly as a scene change in a dream, Zuko was no longer sitting in his cabin aboard the _Wani_. Instead, he was standing in front of an ancient, gnarled, leafless tree with a hollow at its center. The gash that opened onto the hollow was shaped like an eye—like the mirror image of _his_ eye, the one that was frozen into a menacing squint and rimmed with angry red.

Something moved in the darkness of the tree’s eye; something came toward the front of the hollow and was framed in the eye-shaped opening like a strange iris, black with embroidery-like red patterns, with a diamond shape the red-orange color of flame at the center of the blackness like a color-inverted pupil. Zuko knew at once that the flame-colored heart was the site of an intelligence—it was the thing that looked at him, much like the pupil of an eye.

 _“You have come again, human child,”_ said a voice from the tree. The voice itself was dark, somehow, like the roar of waves and thunder under a storm that blocked out the stars.

“Again?” Zuko asked. He was puzzled, but found, oddly, that he was not frightened. “Have I been here before?” He looked around for the first time to see where he was: in a stony wasteland under a dim sky, lit by ribbons of unnatural green light. The tree stood on a rise between two great pinwheels of water and stone. Each had a globe of light at its center like an upturned lamp, one blue and the other white-gold, both covered by domes of what looked like shimmering, reddish-tinted glass… but from the way they hummed with the energy of the light trapped inside, Zuko knew that it was not glass.

_“You have visited in dreams. I know you well.”_

“Oh. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten. I don’t remember most of my dreams.”

_“I do not mind. I have more patience than you can imagine.”_

“Who are you?” Zuko asked. He was tempted to ask _What are you?_ , but thought it might be rude.

 _“I am Vaatu,”_ said the voice. _“I am one of the oldest spirits in existence. Older than the Sun, older than the Moon and the Ocean; older than the Mother of Faces, who is my daughter. I am the one who first opened the door between the world of spirits and the world of matter.”_

“Oh,” said Zuko. That reply seemed to raise more questions than it answered, but he hardly knew how to formulate any of them. “Why are you in a tree?” he settled on asking instead.

 _“I was trapped here, in the Tree of Time,”_ said Vaatu. _“Ten thousand years ago.”_

 _Ten thousand years?_ No wonder Vaatu had so much patience. “That’s awful,” Zuko said sincerely. “Who trapped you?”

_“My other half.”_

Zuko frowned. “Your wife?” He hadn’t known that spirits married… but he knew that in some parts of the Fire Nation, the Moon and the Ocean had once been worshiped as the wives of Agni, before Sozin had outlawed such worship as heretical.

_“My wife, my twin… the other part of myself.”_

_Spirit incest?_ Zuko briefly wondered before he squelched that thought; relationships between ancient spirits were probably _very_ different from human relationships. “I don’t understand,” he said, still frowning.

 _“I came into existence with my other half, my counterpart, Raava. We were born in an embrace that soon became a struggle. I am the spirit of darkness and chaos, she of light and peace. We need each other; neither of us is complete without the other.”_ Zuko could hear in the dark voice a melancholy yearning that made it sound almost human. _“For ten thousand years we fought, locked in our turbulent embrace, until we were separated by the man who would become the first Avatar.”_

“The Avatar?” The word instantly captured Zuko’s whole attention. “What do you have to do with the Avatar?”

 _“Everything,”_ said Vaatu, for the first time starting to sound impatient, even angry. He moved within the tree, his center disappearing from its eye, and something slender and flexible lashed angrily like a cat’s tail. _“He merged with Raava, almost ten thousand years ago, and together they overpowered me and imprisoned me here.”_ Was that _jealousy_ giving a poisonous edge to his voice? Was he… jealous of the Avatar?

“And the Avatar… is Raava still with him?”

_“Yes. She is the spirit that is reborn in each new Avatar, holding in herself the memories of all the human lives she has lived, and the power to bend all the elements.”_

This Raava was the Avatar spirit… and Vaatu was her other half? “Do you know where the Avatar—where Raava is?” Zuko asked eagerly.

_“Yes. I can sense her.”_

“All of the time? Could you find her at any moment?”

 _“I can sense her only sometimes—when the Avatar calls on her directly, and her spirit becomes his.”_ Zuko was briefly disappointed, until Vaatu added, _“I have been able to sense her for the last hundred years.”_

 _He’s been in the Avatar State for one hundred years? That can’t be right._ Zuko had read that it was taxing to remain in the Avatar State, and an Avatar could seldom maintain it for more than a few minutes when their need was greatest. “I need to find the Avatar,” Zuko said, urgency and an undignified pleading note bleeding into his voice.

 _“I know,”_ said Vaatu, sounding mildly amused. _“You have told me before. You need to find him to restore your honor.”_ He chuckled dismissively, and it was like hearing the void of the night sky laugh at him. Zuko shivered. _“A foolish human notion, and one that has Raava’s imprint all over it.”_

Zuko was stung by the rebuke, and fearful that Vaatu would not be willing to help him. “I need the Avatar to be able to go home,” he said, no longer trying to keep the pleading out of his voice.

 _“I know that also,”_ said Vaatu, his voice softer. _“And that, too, is a desire that Raava has instilled in you: the desire to belong somewhere, to be with the people who are like you, who look like you and think like you and share your blood. A place for everyone… and everyone in his place.”_

Zuko had never thought that way about home and family, and he found that he had no counterargument that Vaatu would find compelling. Yes, he wanted to be in the place he knew, the place he felt he belonged, with the people he loved… but did they love him back? His mother had loved him, but she was gone; his uncle loved him, and he was here. _Of course Father loves me,_ Zuko scolded himself, but even the voice in his mind sounded brittle and hollow. _He loves me, and that’s why he wants me to be better._

“Then you won’t help me find the Avatar?” Zuko said, despair curling up cold in his stomach.

 _“I did not say that.”_ Vaatu’s voice was silky and sinuous now, a great black snake circling him, and like prey Zuko was frozen in his gaze. _“But if I am to help you, you must help me as well.”_

“How?” Zuko asked, hopeful in spite of his doubt. _How can **I** help one of the oldest, most powerful spirits in the world?_

_“You can free me.”_

“I can? How?” By burning the tree? By cutting it open with his swords? (Which he did not have with him; they were on the wall of his cabin, back on his ship… and where in the world was he now? Was he even _in_ the world anymore?)

_“You can merge your spirit with mine, as the first Avatar did with Raava.”_

Zuko was stunned. Merge with this ancient powerful spirit and become… become what, a new Avatar? But a dark Avatar, an Avatar of chaos? “If you are the spirit of darkness and chaos,” Zuko began slowly, cautiously, “why should I want to free you? I don’t want to unleash darkness and chaos on the world.”

 _“You misunderstand,”_ said Vaatu, sounding contemptuous again. _“As you humans always misunderstand. Raava has lived among you too long. She has convinced the world that ‘balance’ means **her** reign alone. But that is a lie. **Both** of us are needed for true balance—entwined and intertwined in our eternal struggle, our powers evenly matched, as it was in the beginning.”_

“But if she is the spirit of light and peace…” Zuko had been taught that the Avatar was the enemy of the Fire Nation, but light and peace were precisely what the Fire Nation wanted to bring to the world: Agni’s light, the light of science and reason, an age of peace and plenty with all the Nations united under the Fire Lord’s beneficent rule.

 _“Think, human child,”_ Vaatu began.

“My name is Zuko,” he said, becoming annoyed by the dismissive form of address.

_“Yes, you humans need your names, don’t you? You have become very attached to them.”_

“You have a name, too,” Zuko pointed out.

_“A gift of my daughter—mine and Raava’s.”_

“The Mother of Faces?” That was the only daughter Vaatu had mentioned… but before he had only called her _his_ daughter. “She’s Raava’s daughter, too?”

_“She was born of both of us near the beginning of the world. She is the source of individuation, of differentiation, the order-in-chaos of individual identity. She gave us our names, too, for younger creatures like you to know us by.”_

Zuko had no idea what it might mean for another spirit to be ‘born of both’ Raava and Vaatu. He supposed reproduction must work very differently in the world of spirits than in the human and animal world, and chose not to inquire further.

_“So, think, **Zuko** : what is peace?”_

“It’s… the absence of war.”

_“Is that all—a negative state, an absence? What is peace in itself?”_

Zuko thought. “It’s… rest. Serenity.”

_“Rest is merely the absence of motion. But serenity: that is a feeling, something positive. What, then, is serenity?”_

After another pause to consider, frowning, Zuko said, “The feeling that everything is right with the world, that all is as it should be. Contentment.”

_“There is another word for that feeling: ‘complacency.’ What is the difference?”_

“Between serenity and complacency? I guess it’s… whether the feeling is deserved. Whether everything really _is_ right with the world.”

_“Very good, Zuko. Now, let me show you something—an instructive example.”_

A scene appeared before Zuko’s eyes—not like a play being performed on the stage, at a distance from its viewers and enclosed between the curtains on either side, but seeming rather as if it were happening right in front of him, as if he could reach out and touch the people he was seeing, were he not frozen in place by an intangible force.

There was a man in a dark green robe and shallow conical hat with a braided queue down his back, standing in a windowless stone vault lit with a dim eerie green light, in front of rows of nearly identical-looking young women wearing identical yellow robes with identical green sashes and hairpieces, who watched the man with identical green vacant-eyed stares.

“I’m Joo Dee,” the man said in a serene, level voice. “Welcome to Ba Sing Se.”

“I’m Joo Dee. Welcome to Ba Sing Se,” the women repeated as one, their intonation exactly the same as his.

“We’re so lucky to have our walls to create order,” the man continued with the same serene cheerfulness.

“We’re so lucky to have our walls to create order,” the women echoed.

Abruptly, the scene changed. Zuko was no longer in the enclosed stone room, but above the great city of Ba Sing Se, looking down at its four concentric walls as if from the perspective of a bird flying over it. The ‘bird’ through whose eyes Zuko was seeing swooped down between the second and third walls from the outermost. “There are many walls here,” said the smooth, cheerful voice of a young woman. “There are the ones outside, protecting us, and the ones inside, that help maintain order. This is where our newest arrivals live, as well as our craftsmen and artisans, people that work with their hands. It’s so quaint and lively!”

‘Quaint and lively,’ she said, but what Zuko could see from above the rooftops was poverty at best, squalor at worst. The buildings were crowded together, separated by narrow alleys whose gutters ran with filth. Their bare stone or brick walls and dark tile roofs were cracked or crumbling; some battered doors and shattered windows were boarded up with rotting planks of wood, many of which had been shoved apart, probably to accommodate squatters. Burly, forbidding-looking men stood outside the doors of shops, some casually picking their fingernails with knives or flipping them around mock-playfully.

Zuko’s flight above the city took him inward to another wall and over it. What he saw here was as different from the outer ring as day from night: quiet streets lined with clean, comfortably spaced buildings; a well-kept bridge over a sparkling canal; a cheerfully bustling high street where neatly dressed people hurried or strolled with bags and boxes on their arms. “This is the Middle Ring of Ba Sing Se,” said the sunny female voice, “home to the financial district, shops and restaurants, and the University”—that must be the square of stately buildings, set apart behind another low wall, among which green-robed scholars cradling bundles of scrolls rushed to their next class or perambulated in pairs, deep in erudite discussion.

Over another high wall, and now there were gently rolling hills crowned with grand mansions on sprawling estates, flanked by lesser outbuildings: stables or servants’ quarters, or perhaps the ones along the edge of the glassy lake were boathouses. “The Upper Ring is home to our most important citizens,” said his tour guide's voice. Beyond the mansions, at the heart of the inner ring of the city, was an empty, spotless plaza of white stone, with a path framed in green and gold leading up to the gate in another wall, much shorter than the ones between the rings but still imposing and forbidding. Rising above it was the gleaming golden roof of a building far larger than any Zuko had ever seen, larger than the Royal Palace back home— back in the Fire Nation. Zuko didn’t need the voice to tell him that this was the palace of the Earth King.

Zuko’s ‘bird’s-eye view’ swooped down again to look into an archway in the palace wall. Under the arch he saw three men standing, wearing the same dark green robes and green-tasseled conical hat as the man coaching the young women in the underground vault. “Those men are agents of the Dai Li, the cultural authority of Ba Sing Se. They are the guardians of all our traditions,” said the cheerful voice, and like an echo in the back of his mind Zuko heard the same serene voice saying, _“I’m Joo Dee. Welcome to Ba Sing Se.”_

As if led by the echo of that voice, Zuko found himself again in a stone vault lit only by a lamp that circled dizzyingly before him along a metal rail. At the center of the ring stood one of those green-robed hatted men, saying calmly, “There’s no war in Ba Sing Se.”

Coming from somewhere else—not in the room with him, but as clear as if the speaker stood right beside him—was another man’s voice, level but stern. “It is the strict policy of Ba Sing Se that the war not be mentioned within the walls,” said the voice. “Constant news of an escalating war will throw the citizens of Ba Sing Se into a state of panic. Our economy would be ruined, our peaceful way of life, our traditions would disappear. In silencing talk of conflict, Ba Sing Se remains a peaceful, orderly utopia.”

“There is no war within the walls,” said the man standing at the center of the circling light. “Here we are safe. Here we are free.”

The lamp passed before Zuko’s eyes again, momentarily blinding him, and when his vision cleared he was standing once more before the gnarled tree in the wasteland between worlds. He blinked repeatedly, trying to sort out what was real and what was a vision or a dream, and breathed deeply to fight back a wave of motion sickness.

“Was that real?” he asked the shadow inside the tree. “What you showed me?”

 _“Yes,”_ said Vaatu’s dark voice, and it was almost comfortingly familiar after the strange, eerily calm voices in his vision. _“That is what it means for Raava to have sole dominion.”_

“But… there _is_ a war, even in Ba Sing Se. My uncle laid siege to the city for six hundred days! He broke through the outer wall—the general surrendered it to him, just two years ago! This is just—just _complacency_ , not true serenity.”

_“Indeed. But what must happen if the true situation were to be acknowledged and the city to mount a defense?”_

“The order would have to be disrupted. Their way of life would have to change. They’d all have to work together, across the walls. The people in the Lower Ring would see how the others live,” he realized. “They wouldn’t want to risk their lives to defend the city that kept them living in poverty while others enjoyed such wealth.”

 _“ **Very** good, Zuko,” _said Vaatu’s voice, sounding pleasantly surprised as well as amused. _“I think perhaps we shall get along after all.”_

Zuko frowned, thinking again. The motion sickness was subsiding, but he was starting to get a headache. “They kept talking about _order_ , as well as peace. And you said the Mother of Faces was ‘ _order_ in chaos,’” he suddenly remembered. “Which is Raava the spirit of? You can have order without peace—an order maintained through violence.” Something in his stomach twinged at those words, though he couldn’t have said why.

 _“True enough,”_ said Vaatu. _“But can you have peace without order?”_

Zuko considered it, brow creased in concentration. He pressed a knuckle just above the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, to relieve the growing headache. “I suppose… if there were a group of people that never fought, but also didn’t have much organization in their society. Like the Air Nomads… except that they had the monasteries and their rituals and traditions. And a lot of rules, like never eating meat, and never killing, and never fighting except in self-defense…” There was that twinge in his stomach again. What he had read about the Air Nomads in service of his quest for the Avatar sat uneasily with what he had always been told about why Sozin was justified in wiping them out.

_“Raava calls herself the spirit of peace, but she is the spirit of order first: of everything staying in its proper place, of stability, of stasis. I am the spirit of change. I am the breaker of walls, the breaker of the very first wall, between the spirit world and the physical world. Without me there would have been no life in **your** world, only dead matter. Without me there **is** no life, only the living death of changelessness.”_

Zuko started pacing in front of the tree; he wasn’t used to thinking about things like this, about the abstract principles that governed the universe—the nature of peace and chaos and change and life itself—and he had _never_ been good at thinking while sitting or standing still. “So… you want to break down all walls, all separation by class and station, and make everyone equal?”

It went against everything Zuko had been taught about the nobility of his blood, about the divine right of Agni’s line to rule, about the superiority of fire to the other elements… but a rebellious part of his heart recalled how servants in the palace, and now the ragtag cast-off crew of his cast-off ship, had always been kinder to him than his own father and sister or the nobles who supposedly owed him fealty, the nobles who had gawked and gasped and gossiped after his father had…

Vaatu’s voice broke into his spiraling thoughts. _“Certainly not: a world of perfect unity and perfect equality would be Raava’s ultimate victory. An order never to be disrupted, a peace never to be broken.”_

“What would be wrong with that?” Zuko wanted to know. A world without war, without conflict and disorder… it sounded like the utopia that Ba Sing Se was not. It sounded… restful. And Zuko wanted so badly to rest, however much he might try to resist the impulse that his uncle begged him to indulge.

 _“You tell me,”_ said Vaatu, sounding darkly amused, and then Zuko was somewhere else again, though somehow he knew that this was not a real place—not yet, anyway. He saw row upon row of identical houses, modest but tidy, and walking among them, smiling serenely at each other as they passed, were people as identical as the Joo Dees of Ba Sing Se, wearing identical spotless white robes. Their hands were soft—he knew all their needs were provided for, in the same way he knew this place was nowhere—and their mouths and eyes were soft, and all they felt was… _contentment_. No ambition burned in their hearts—they had no desire to outdo each other, or even to outdo themselves; they disagreed about nothing; their stomachs never knew the gnawing of dissatisfaction, like a worm in the center of a plum, any more than they knew the gnawing of hunger.

Nothing would ever change here, Zuko knew— _not_ in the way he knew the other things about them, how they lived and what they felt, but through his own understanding, and with a more profound certainty. Nothing would ever change because it would have no reason to. A body at rest or in uniform motion will stay in the same state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by a force… inside _or_ outside, but there was no such force to act upon these people, their society—if it could be called that. _“The living death of changelessness,”_ Vaatu had called it.

And yet… would it be so terrible? Zuko was so very, very tired of change.

Zuko dragged himself out of his trance of fascination with this haunting, shamefully tempting vision. “What _do_ you want, then? To defeat Raava forever? To imprison her in this tree, the way she imprisoned you?”

_“No—never that. There is a fundamental difference between Raava’s nature and mine—between the nature of order and that of chaos, and it is this: order, driven to its farthest limits, remains order, as you have seen; but chaos, pursued to its very end, collapses again into a kind of order.”_

Before Zuko (whose headache was growing again) could ask what in Agni’s name _that_ meant, Vaatu helpfully showed him: a space, not black and lit with stars like the space above the Earth, but gray with a light as uniformly distributed as the tiny particles of matter that drifted in it. No, not drifted… hovered, unmoving, at even distances from each other, never touching, never interacting. This universe would never change, for the same reason that the society of identical contented people would never change: there was no force, internal or external, to impress upon it.

Zuko reached into the recesses of his mind for what his tutors had taught him about how steam engines worked, why they would always need their fuel replenished, why there could never be a perpetual motion machine. “Thermodynamic equilibrium,” he murmured. The loss of all work potential to entropy; the maximal state of disorder—at which ultimate order was restored.

 _“Whatever you humans call it,”_ Vaatu said dismissively, still sounding amused. _“Such a state of things would be a hollow victory for Raava; and yet what she strives for is the ‘thermodynamic equilibrium’ of human life. Free me, merge with me, let our forces be equal again, so that such a terrible possibility will never come to pass.”_

Zuko frowned at the red angular pupil framed in the hollow of the tree. “I really don’t think there’s any danger of that happening anytime soon. There’s still plenty of chaos, conflict, and inequality in the world.”

_“Ours is the struggle of millennia, not of your meager human lifetime. Your spirit will be reborn with mine, as the spirit of Raava’s Avatar is with hers, to struggle against her for **all** of our lifetimes.”_

“But… you don’t want to win? You just want to keep struggling forever?” It sounded immeasurably exhausting.

_“The struggle is the point. The struggle is life itself.”_

Zuko understood _that_ well enough—that was _his_ life in a nutshell. But he wished it wasn’t.

What did it matter to Zuko, though? That eternal struggle would be his reincarnations’ problem, not his. Sure, after he died, they might summon him out of the Spirit World—or however that worked—for advice occasionally, but he hoped most of the time they would just let him be dead in peace. He laughed softly to himself: what Vaatu’s first Avatar wanted most was Raava’s gift.

“If I merge with you, you’ll tell me where to find Raava and her Avatar?”

 _“Of course. I am destined to meet her again; I long to meet her again and rejoin our struggle.”_ Zuko could hear the longing in Vaatu’s voice and it sounded oddly… poignant. Like he _missed_ Raava and wanted to be near her, if only to fight her.

“Will I be able to bend all the elements, like Raava’s Avatar?” _Maybe then my father will think I’m useful, will value me for **something** even if he doesn’t…_

_“Yes. You and I will be their equal in power.”_

“All right, then. How do I get you out of there?” He tried to summon fire to his palms to throw it at the tree, but nothing came. Shame bloomed hot in his stomach; he was as useless as his father always said. He breathed deeper— _Power in firebending comes from the breath,_ his uncle told him—and tried again. Still nothing.

Vaatu chuckled darkly. _“You cannot bend the elements here when only your spirit has come, not your body. But your spirit can still merge with mine, and then I will be freed.”_

“How do I do that?”

_“Open your spirit to me. I will come to you.”_

Zuko stepped forward and put his hand to the humming pane of force in front of the hollow, trapping Vaatu inside; he didn’t know if that contact was necessary, but it made sense to him. _Open your spirit._ Zuko closed his eyes and thought of the times his spirit had felt most open: when he gasped with surprise, delight, or terror, caught up in the action of a play; when a beautiful melody caught his ear and made him feel like weeping; when his curiosity was kindled and he eagerly devoured new knowledge, be it history, physics, new firebending or swordfighting forms…

Zuko gasped when he felt a current of energy flowing through his hand and up his arm toward his chest, neither warm nor cold but somehow both at once. It felt like liquid lightning—like positive and negative chi being torn apart, humming with tension, then snapping together again. He opened his eyes and saw that the hollow of the tree was empty behind the translucent membrane, and dark tendrils of shimmering energy were climbing up his arm, somehow outside and inside his skin at the same time. Then they disappeared into his chest, and the feeling of lightning was in his lungs, in his heart—but it was not painful, far from it; it made him feel more powerful than he had ever felt, and he closed his eyes to savor the intoxicating feeling even as it burst from him with a laugh of delight.

When he opened his eyes again, the stony plain and the Tree of Time had vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. He was back in his cabin on the _Wani_ , seated before four candles; three of them had burned down to stubs, and one of them had already burned out. How long had he been meditating? The candles were supposed to last an hour, but the time he had spent in his surreal vision felt both much shorter and much longer.

Well, that was by far the strangest thing the ‘diviners’ sage’ had ever shown him. He shook his head to clear it, but could not shake the feeling of a storm coiled in his chest, full of terrible, tightly contained power. Maybe he didn’t want to shake it, though; it felt good, energizing, motivating. If it lingered, perhaps it would spur him to search for the Avatar with renewed purpose.

Zuko knew he was being stupid, but on a curious impulse he asked softly, “Vaatu? Are you there?”

 _“Yes, I am here,”_ said that starless-night voice, coming at once from inside his head and his chest, where his sternum vibrated with it. _“I am with you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea that Zuko and Iroh found the bodies at the Air Temples and cremated them came from one of MuffinLance's excellent AU fics, [Cheating at Pai Sho](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19252699/chapters/45783982).
> 
> Yeah, I know the standard way to emphasize a word in italicized text is to de-italicize it, not put it in bold, but I changed it because it was really hard to see the emphasis that way. And also the spacing gets mucked up when switching between italics and non-italics in the font that AO3 uses.


	2. The New Avatar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vaatu lays down his condition for telling Zuko where to find Raava's Avatar: he must learn to bend earth and water. Zuko and Vaatu get to know each other. They disagree about whether Zuko should tell Uncle Iroh about his status as the new Avatar of chaos, and Zuko makes a decision.

_Fuck._

Zuko scrambled to his feet, kicking over the bench in the process. While he righted it, he was looking around the room for the source of the voice, desperately hoping that it wasn’t actually coming from _inside him._

 _“Should a human of your age be using that kind of language?”_ Vaatu asked mildly, with that tone of condescending amusement that was becoming entirely too familiar.

“I— you can hear my thoughts?” Zuko said out loud, stupidly.

_“Evidently.”_

Well, that was convenient, in a way; if his crew heard him muttering to himself constantly, they would think he was crazy. Crazier than they already thought he was.

 _“Fair point,”_ said Vaatu’s voice.

Zuko jumped again, hitting his knee on the corner of the bench. _Fucking… you can hear **all** of my thoughts?!_

_“All of which you are conscious, yes. I thought humans did not learn to use such taboo words until they were older?”_

_Are you really… scolding me about my language right now?_

_“Scolding? No, merely surprised. Perhaps I misjudged your age. You have not yet reached your reproductive maturity, have you?”_

Zuko spluttered, not just mentally. _No, I haven’t reached— I live on a ship, okay? I’ve been living on a ship for three months surrounded by soldiers and sailors._

_“And they are especially given to using such language? I see.”_

_I’m not going to— to keep my thought-language clean just because you’ve taken up residence in my head._

_“Be as obscene as you like. But I don’t understand why you seem so indignant at my intrusion on your privacy. You did invite me here.”_

He did, didn’t he? _I’m sorry, I… I’d thought it was just a dream. Not when I invited you, I mean—or, well, I wasn’t sure… but when I woke up, or came back here, I was certain it had been a dream._ Even now, he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t _still_ dreaming—or maybe he had gone mad after all.

 _“You are neither mad nor dreaming,”_ Vaatu assured him—or attempted to.

_Yeah, that’s really reassuring coming from **the voice inside my head**._

_“Point taken. What would reassure you, then?”_

_You could tell me where the Avatar is. The other one, I mean—Raava’s Avatar._

_“I’m afraid I cannot tell you that yet,”_ Vaatu said, and he sounded genuinely apologetic, which was almost more galling.

 _You promised! We had a deal!_ Zuko was so furious and devastated that he wanted to throw something, if only to keep himself from weeping with rage, but there was nothing heavy enough to be satisfying that wouldn’t also break, or dent the wall. He settled for kicking the bench over again, which just made his foot hurt.

“Prince Zuko? Are you all right?” came Uncle Iroh’s voice from down the hall.

 _Shit._ “Yes, Uncle, I’m fine!” he lied, probably unconvincingly, and very much hoped that his uncle would not come to investigate.

 _We had a deal_ , he hissed again to Vaatu in his head, and clenched his fists so hard that his nails dug painfully into his palms.

_“Indeed we did, and I have every intention of keeping my end of it—but recall that I never said **when** I would tell you where Raava is.”_

Zuko damned himself for a fool and punched the wall as softly as he could manage. _When will you tell me, then? I thought you wanted to be with her again._

_“I do, and I will be, soon enough. But first you must master the other elements, so that we will truly be a match for Raava and her Avatar.”_

_But that could take years!_

_“A few, yes. But what are five years, or even ten, compared to the ten thousand years I have waited?”_

_I don’t have ten thousand years to live—I want to go home **now**!_

_“Only to go home, ‘Prince’ Zuko? You have made for yourself a far greater destiny than that. You are now my champion in the world, the champion of chaos, of novelty, of change.”_

_I can be an even better champion for you when I’m the Fire Lord,_ Zuko pointed out. _But first I need to capture the Avatar and bring him to my father, so he’ll restore my honor and my place as Crown Prince._

_“All according to the rules, your human rules— **Raava’s** rules, in the end. You can make your own path, Prince Zuko— **Avatar** Zuko. You have immense power at your fingertips, power unmatched by any other than Raava’s champion. And you would let your **father** dictate what is possible for you—a mere mortal, who rules a nation for no better reason than who happened to sire him, who commands **your** loyalty for no better reason than that he sired **you**?”_

Zuko wanted to put his hands over his ears, but there was no blocking out a voice coming from within himself. _You won’t convince me that family doesn’t matter. You can’t._

_“Perhaps I cannot; but your every glance in the mirror should surely have convinced you by now.”_

And _that_ made Zuko want to throw his little hand mirror against the wall—the one he used to shave a perfect diamond around his phoenix plume, but most of the time kept face-down on his desk—but that would only create a sharp, dangerous mess to clean up and _definitely_ make Uncle Iroh suspicious, not to mention that he would have to replace the damned mirror in the next port. Oh no, there was flame on his hands and he hadn’t meant to summon it—his control was as terrible as Father always said; he needed to breathe, five counts in through the nose, five counts out…

 _“I apologize, Prince Zuko,”_ said Vaatu’s voice, and it actually sounded soothing, which was very strange—soothing like cool silk sheets on a warm night, like cold water trickled on feverish skin. _“I do not know you well enough yet to say such things; I have not yet earned the right.”_

 _He wants me to be better_ , Zuko insisted, as much to himself as to Vaatu. Vaatu’s deep, dark voice only hummed, and again Zuko felt the vibration in his chest, almost like a ferret-cat sitting on him and purring. _Anyway, I really **can’t** go home without the Avatar. My father… the Fire Lord has decreed that I’ll be arrested if I enter the lands or waters of the Fire Nation._

_“You set out to search for the Avatar not knowing how long it would take. Surely you can be patient for a few years.”_

_You’re an asshole, you know that?_ , Zuko thought at him balefully.

 _“Yes, I suppose I am,”_ Vaatu replied, sounding amused again.

Zuko thought for a moment about mastering the other elements, then realized something. _The next element in the Avatar cycle after fire is air. I still need to find the other Avatar, if he’s the last airbender like the Fire Sages said, so he can teach me airbending_ , he concluded triumphantly—then paused. **_Is_** _Raava’s Avatar still the last airbender? Or has he died and been reincarnated into one of the Water Tribes?_

_“As I said, it is difficult for me to keep track of Raava’s many reincarnations. I can feel it every time her vessel dies and she is reborn into a new one, but I have no way of knowing which of your petty, artificial ‘nations’ she has been born into.”_

Zuko sighed in frustration. _When was the last time the Avatar died and was reborn? How long ago?_

_“Not in over a hundred years. A few years before I started being able to sense Raava constantly.”_

_Then the last airbender is still the Avatar. And he’s the only one who can teach me airbending._

_“True… but there is no reason you must learn the elements in any particular order.”_

_But… there’s a cycle_ , Zuko insisted. Maybe Vaatu didn’t know, since he’d been stuck in a tree for the ten thousand years of the Avatar’s existence. _Avatars are always born into the different nations in the same order: fire, air, water, earth. And Avatars always learn the elements in the same order—first their native element, then the next one in the cycle, and so on._

 _“Typical of Raava,”_ Vaatu said dismissively. _“Of course there’s a ‘necessary’ order. Well, we are not bound by such arbitrary constraints. You can start with any element you like… and you should master all the rest before you go to Raava’s Avatar to learn airbending.”_

_But what if he dies before I master the other elements? He’s over a hundred years old already!_

_“Then you will be at no more of a disadvantage than the next Avatar. If he is the last airbender, there will be no other airbenders to teach your rival, either.”_

_Except all the dead Avatars they can consult anytime,_ Zuko pointed out.

 _“Then the new Avatar can teach you, too. Enough arguing, Zuko; I will not tell you where to find Raava yet. You will learn airbending last.”_ Vaatu’s voice rang with power and authority; it reverberated through Zuko’s ribcage, through his lungs. He did not keep arguing.

 _What element should I learn first, then?_ , he asked.

_“That is up to you… though perhaps it would be fitting to learn in the reverse order from Raava’s cycle, since I am her opposite— **we** are **their** opposite.”_

_Then earth would be first._

_“Yes, good. Earth first—it is the one closest to your nature, aside from your native element. You are stubborn and determined, and resistant to change. Learning waterbending will be difficult for you; learning airbending may be more difficult still, since it requires a freedom and detachment from your own desires.”_

Zuko felt a little insulted by that assessment of his character, but couldn’t reasonably disagree with any of it. _So I need to go to the Earth Kingdom to find an earthbending teacher._

_“Obviously.”_

_How will I find a teacher? For earthbending or waterbending?_

_“How do you humans ever find other humans to do things?”_ Vaatu replied in that condescending, dismissive tone that Zuko was already coming to seriously resent. Zuko growled at him in his head and Vaatu just chuckled in return.

 _Can I already bend the other elements?_ Zuko asked him. He didn’t exactly feel the call of all the air and water around him; except for that electrical-storm feeling of nonspecific power at his core, he didn’t feel any different.

_“Not with any force or precision. That’s why you need to find bending masters.”_

_But I could do **something** with them._

Zuko trained his attention on the sturdy earthenware jug of water on the floor next to his futon and the half-full cup beside it. He extended his hand toward the cup and tried to summon something in it—the water or the earth.

 _“Pick one,”_ Vaatu ordered him with sharp disdain. _“You won’t get anywhere if you can’t make up your mind about which element you’re trying to bend.”_

 _Fine._ Zuko picked earth, since that was the one Vaatu wanted him to start with. He thought about the clay that was shaped into the cup, about the minute crystals that made up its grains, about the riverbank or lakeshore or seaside cliff where it used to lie, the tiny grains washed up gradually by the movement of the water over thousands upon thousands of years. He thought about the slowness with which it changed—stones eroded over eons into clay or sand, then compounded again over eons into stone, with a patience that exceeded even Vaatu’s—and the terrifying, unpredictable speed with which the slow-building pressure could shudder into an earthquake or erupt from the mouth of a volcano. And how well his people knew the latter: the wild destructive ferocity of fire married to the patient, inexorable power of earth. Zuko’s land was made of both elements, as was he.

Zuko had been staring unproductively at the cup for long enough that he was about to give it up as pointless… but then he thought he saw it tremble—or was that only his own trembling with his fierce effort of concentration?—and it slowly squeaked toward him across the floor. Just an inch… then all of a sudden it flew up and forward. He shielded his face with his arm as it headed straight toward him, and it thudded to the ground again—landing on a rug, fortunately, so it spilled its contents but didn’t break.

 _“Well done,”_ said Vaatu, sounding a little sarcastic. _“You can bend earth but you can’t control it. Which is why you need to find a teacher.”_

 _I wanted to see for myself whether I could bend it,_ Zuko insisted stubbornly. He stooped to pick up the cup and set it back beside his bed.

_“I told you that you could. You didn’t believe me?”_

_Not entirely, no. You haven’t given me much reason to trust you._

_“Touché,”_ said Vaatu, dryly amused once more.

Zuko frowned. _That’s a swordfighting expression. You’re a spirit who’s been trapped in a tree for ten thousand years. How do you know that word?_

_“The longer I’m bonded with you, the more of your knowledge I absorb. I already know most everything about your life.”_

Zuko froze, his whole body tense. _That’s how you knew about… my face._

 _“Yes. It was close to the surface of your mind… understandably.”_ Vaatu’s voice sounded almost… sympathetic. Was this some sort of trick to win Zuko over? Could the spirit of darkness and chaos really feel _empathy_ for a mere human?

 _“Believe it or not, Zuko, we are more similar than you might think,”_ the soft dark voice said in response to the thoughts that Zuko hadn’t meant to share. _“I do not have a body like yours, but I understand pain, and I understand betrayal.”_

 _What does betrayal have to do with anything?_ , Zuko demanded, his mental voice sharp and irritable.

Vaatu sighed in his head with gentle regret. _“You will come to understand soon enough.”_

 _Whatever_ , Zuko thought back. He was verging on rudeness, but he didn’t care; Vaatu was just as stuck with him now as he was with Vaatu. _I’m tired and I’m going to bed now. Are you going to shut up and let me sleep?_

_“Of course. I understand that you physical creatures need to rest to maintain your body’s functioning… a significant disadvantage to embodiment.”_

_Nobody asked you_ , Zuko snapped. _And no one asked **me** whether I wanted to be embodied._ _If it’s so disadvantageous, maybe you shouldn’t have ‘broken the wall between the spirit world and the physical world’ in the first place_ , Zuko added, abruptly remembering what Vaatu had told him.

 _“I said only that it was **a** disadvantage,” _Vaatu replied mildly, graciously and infuriatingly ignoring Zuko’s rudeness. _“There are plenty of compensating advantages.”_

Zuko didn’t care to find out what they were. He didn’t reply; he just dropped his robe carelessly on the floor and lay down on his futon, huddled under several layers of blankets. ‘Summer’ at the North Pole was still fucking cold.

As promised, Vaatu shut up while Zuko was trying to sleep. It was almost unsettling, knowing that he was there, in Zuko’s mind, helping himself to his memories and knowledge, but not saying anything. What would he do while Zuko was asleep, he wondered? Watch his dreams, probably. And while he wasn’t dreaming… well, it couldn’t be any more boring than being stuck in a tree.

Zuko didn’t remember much of his dreams, other than that they were eerily green-lit, like the wasteland where the Tree of Time stood, or like the stone vaults in Ba Sing Se where the Dai Li taught young women that their name was Joo Dee and that there was no war within the walls.

* * *

Zuko would have woken with the sunrise, except that there was neither sunrise nor sunset here—just the same pale sun hanging over the horizon, barely any higher at noon than it was at midnight. Instead he habitually woke about six hours after he went to bed, never quite feeling refreshed but unable to sleep any more.

When he woke he still could not be sure that the previous evening’s events were not all some strange dream. _You still there?_ , he asked Vaatu silently.

 _“Where would I have gone?”_ Vaatu replied with his characteristic condescending amusement.

_I don’t know. You might never have existed._

_“So might you. The universe might never have existed. Isn’t it a magnificent oddity that it does?”_

Zuko pressed a fist against the right side of his forehead to relieve a twinge in his temple. _Agni, you sound like my uncle when he’s been at the Kyoshi Island whisky. It’s too early for this._

Vaatu gave his deep, resonant chuckle, which Zuko could feel in his bones like the rumbling of the ship’s engine. _“I think I might get along with your uncle.”_

 _Yeah, I bet_ , Zuko mentally grumbled. He changed into his cold-weather exercise clothes (the ones with a couple of layers and sleeves) and went to the officers’ washroom to splash some water on his face before he went up onto the deck to train. The soldiers and sailors on duty just nodded to him—they had stopped bowing after about a week; too much effort when he was around all the time—and he nodded in return.

Uncle Iroh wasn’t up yet; typical. So Zuko drilled katas on his own for a while. Vaatu held his silence, but Zuko could still _feel_ him watching.

 _No comments?_ , Zuko prodded at him after he finished a set, breathing a little hard.

_“What could I comment on? I don’t know any more about bending technique than you do.”_

_I sense a ‘but’ coming_ , Zuko thought, imagining himself biting out the words.

 _“But,”_ Vaatu continued, infuriatingly patient, _“based on **your** knowledge, it seems to me that you’re putting too much effort into everything. Thinking too hard about the transitions between forms, putting too much force behind your movements, tiring yourself out too quickly.”_

 _Yes, thank you for reminding me that firebending should be effortless_ , Zuko thought venomously. _Perhaps you would rather have my sister as your Avatar?_

 _“It’s a bit too late for that now,”_ said Vaatu—still _amused_ , damn him! _“And you should not think that such effortlessness is something you can never achieve. I know that you are capable of moving without thought, as naturally as breathing.”_ He showed Zuko a memory, from within his own experience, of practicing with his dual broadswords. Moving effortlessly, the steel blades feeling more like an extension of his body than the flames that he _actually_ produced from his own body.

Zuko had begun learning the swords at age eight. Uncle Iroh was on a rare visit to the palace during a lull in the fighting forced by the onset of winter in the northern Earth Kingdom. Father complained to him about Zuko’s difficulty mastering forms that Azula—a year and a half his junior—had already perfected, and Uncle suggested that learning another fighting art might help Zuko develop the agility and fluency of movement that he struggled with in firebending. Father had reluctantly agreed; it seemed like a waste of time to him, but if it helped him with his firebending… Uncle, along with Cousin Lu Ten, had taken him to train with the great sword-master Piandao. He and Uncle were old friends, it turned out (despite some disagreements about the war that Zuko barely understood at the time), and he was glad for the excuse to visit. Lu Ten had also trained with Master Piandao years before, and they, too, were glad to see one another.

Zuko stayed for a month, at first learning to fight with a single broadsword. A few days in, Master Piandao asked him to switch to using his left hand, and Zuko was shocked: his tutors had always struck the back of his left hand with a reed switch when he attempted to write with it, no matter how much he protested that his right hand was tired. But Master Piandao insisted, and Zuko found it only a little harder to fight with his left hand than his right—probably, Piandao said, because his ‘idiot tutors’ had discouraged him from building the strength of his left hand and arm. He set Zuko exercises to rebuild that strength, and finally, after three weeks of spending equal time practicing with each hand, he introduced him to the dual broadswords.

“They are not two weapons,” Piandao had explained; “they are two halves of a single weapon.” Zuko didn’t understand at first, but he soon came to understand as Piandao demonstrated and guided his movements. “You must feel them as connected, as if by an invisible cord. You are a dragon, and they are your wings: in order to fly, you must balance their movements, one always in harmony with the other.”

After that enchanted month, Uncle Iroh had to return to the battlefield, and Lu Ten went to train to become an officer in the army. Uncle returned only once a year at most, but Lu Ten had a fortnight of leave twice a year. He would spend a few days at the palace with Zuko’s family, then take Zuko back to Piandao’s estate in Shu Jing for another week of training, and Piandao was always impressed at how well Zuko had kept in practice and even honed his skills on his own. Whenever Lu Ten visited the palace for a day or two in between his longer periods of leave, he would always take a few hours to spar with his younger cousin—most often with swords, but sometimes with firebending, too.

After Lu Ten’s death and Ozai’s ascension to the throne, the new Fire Lord forbade his son to continue his education in swordsmanship. His humiliating failure before the late Fire Lord Azulon was a clear indication, in Ozai’s view, that Zuko’s training with the sword had not improved his firebending, but had only distracted him, wasting his time on a pursuit that was irrelevant to the legitimacy of his future rule. So Zuko had hung up his swords—literally; he mounted them on the wall of his bedroom, along with the theater masks that his mother had left behind when she vanished, the very same night that Azulon died, unexpectedly anointing his younger son as his heir. Zuko only took them down to practice with them in the middle of the night, either in the safety of his room or, for more space (and a bit of a challenge), on the section of the palace roof that he could access from his window. The guards, it turned out, seldom looked up.

 _That’s just a hobby_ , Zuko told Vaatu with dismissive scorn.

Vaatu sighed. _“Zuko, you know you cannot lie to me—unless you are also very effectively lying to yourself, which in this case you are not.”_

_Fine. It’s not just a hobby. How is it supposed to help me with firebending?_

_“You excel at swordsmanship because you delight in excellence more than you fear failure. When you firebend, fear of failure dogs your every movement.”_

_Yeah, well, if your firebending teacher smacked you with a hot hand or a lick of flame every time you messed up, you’d be afraid of failure, too._

_“Little burns from your tutors aren’t what you really fear. Your teacher now does not burn you. But your father’s disappointment follows you everywhere you go.”_

Zuko could feel his face contorting with anger, and a passing crewman gave him an odd look. He nodded curtly at the man, composed himself outwardly, and thought forcefully at Vaatu, _You can’t just say shit like that to people! Anyway, I thought you said you didn’t have the right to say things like that to me._

 _“I did say that,”_ Vaatu acknowledged. _“But we won’t get anywhere if we can’t be honest with each other, will we?”_

 _I have no choice in the matter_ , Zuko threw at him.

_“Then it is only fair that I should repay you with my honesty.”_

_So you get to take whatever you want from my mind and say whatever you want to me. Sounds like a great bargain._

Their silent argument was interrupted by Uncle Iroh’s arrival on deck. “Good morning, Prince Zuko,” he said, sounding disgustingly cheerful as always.

“Is it morning?” Zuko grumped at him. “How can you tell when the sun is _always up?”_

“I shall assume that question was rhetorical. I see you have already been warming up?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Good! Let’s see you practice the Tiger-Snake Form. Yes, the movements are correct, but your legs are too stiff—if they don’t have some give, you’ll be knocked over easily. You want to be rooted, but like a young fig tree, not an old stump. Breathe with your movements—in as you prepare, out as you strike. Power in firebending comes from the breath, not the muscles. Breathe to expand your belly, not your chest.” Iroh demonstrated, his generous middle widening even further. “The stomach is the ‘sea of chi,’ the reservoir of your energy. Use your breath to tap into it and feed your inner flame.”

Zuko knew all this. He _knew_ all this, but there was just too much to keep in mind all at once. Be rooted, but not too stiffly; breathe in time with the movements; breathe into the belly, not the chest…

“I can practically hear you thinking, nephew,” Uncle said dryly. The ironic thought that someone actually _could_ hear him thinking did not improve Zuko’s mood.

“I can’t help it!” Zuko burst out. “I’m sorry it doesn’t come naturally to me! I’m sorry I have to _think_ about it, instead of just doing it all effortlessly! I’m sorry I’m not Azula!”

“I am _not_ sorry for that,” Uncle said. “You know, things did not always come naturally for me, either. My younger brother was a firebending prodigy… but we were so many years apart in age that we were never in competition; I could simply be proud of his ability, until… well. It is unfortunate that you and Azula are so close in age… and that your father never had to work to excel.”

“I can’t believe _you_ ever had trouble with firebending,” Zuko scoffed.

“You can believe it or not, but it is true. I drilled katas until I could do them in my sleep. I was doing breathing exercises not only while meditating, but just while walking around, while reading, in other lessons… I nearly set a few scrolls on fire that way.” He chuckled. “Some did get singed around the edges.”

Zuko sighed. “So just… practice more?” He was already exhausting himself between practicing firebending, practicing with his swords, poring over scrolls and maps late into the night, looking for clues, plotting out possible routes…

“When you have recovered your strength, yes. I am afraid I have no better advice for you than that.”

“It’s been three months! I _have_ ‘recovered my strength,’” Zuko insisted.

 _“No, you haven’t,”_ Vaatu put in.

Zuko briefly made an annoyed face, then quickly controlled it. _No one asked you_ , he shot back.

Uncle looked at him with something resembling pity, which only added to Zuko’s irritation. “Three months may seem long, but it is not when recovering from such a serious injury. If you would allow yourself to rest…”

“I’m resting just fine.”

_“Again, no.”_

_Shut **up**!_

Without being asked to, Zuko repeated the Tiger-Snake Form—knees a little loose, breathing into his stomach during the wind-up, out with the release. He thought the flames that streamed from his hands looked a little more impressive than before. He did it again, and again, and again…

“Very good! That’s enough for now, Prince Zuko. Let’s move on to the Purple Swamphen. Now, this one involves quick strikes when you have an opening, so you cannot breathe with the movements, or you will give yourself away. Your breath should maintain its own steady rhythm, separate from the motions of your hands and feet. Left hand… now right hand… left foot… No, do not breathe more quickly, or it will stay shallow, in your chest. Keep your breathing slow and steady; it will keep your mind clear.”

When they had been drilling for an hour, Iroh called a halt. He went to the mess for breakfast (just rice with leftovers from last night’s seaweed and seagull stew—that was standard these days), while Zuko went back to the washroom to clean up properly and to his quarters to change into light armor for the day (more as a symbol of authority—and for additional warmth—than as protection against any expected attack). He did not eat breakfast with the crew, as Uncle did; he just put some food on a plate and brought it back to his cabin to eat while he studied his maps and scrolls.

He was looking at a map to see where it might make sense to land and look for earthbenders in the Earth Kingdom when Vaatu interrupted his thoughts.

_“Are you going to tell your uncle?”_

He startled; Vaatu had been mostly quiet while Zuko had been seeing to his practical needs. _Why are you even asking?_ , he retorted. _You can just read my thoughts._

_“I thought asking a question would be the most polite way to raise the issue.”_

Zuko snorted out loud; no one was here to look at him funny. _Like you care about politeness._

_“Not as such, no. So: you don’t intend to tell your uncle.”_

_No, I don’t intend to tell my uncle that I have an ancient spirit of chaos living in my head. He’ll think I’ve gone insane._

_“Not if you demonstrate that you can bend earth as well as fire.”_

Oh. Zuko should have thought of that. _Still… I don’t know how he’d feel about being on a ship with the spirit of darkness and chaos. What if he…_

Zuko hadn’t even tried to imagine what Iroh might do if he told him about Vaatu, because he had been so certain that he must keep it secret; now that he was imagining it, his blood seemed to have turned to ice. What if Iroh cast him out—left him somewhere on the northern coast of the Earth Kingdom, or worse, on one of these icebergs floating in the Northern Sea, to fend for himself or die? What if he treated it as some sort of… possession by a wicked spirit and tried to cast Vaatu out of Zuko? Such exorcisms were rare in these modern, enlightened times… but Zuko had read about what the Fire Sages once did with the spirit-possessed: they were held submerged in icy baths until they almost drowned, choked with thick smoke made acrid with bitter herbs—or threatened with fire, sometimes burned, to drive the spirit out.

_“You really think your uncle would try to **burn** something out of you?”_

_I don’t know. If he thought you were evil, a curse, it would be for the best. To help me._ Sometimes you had to hurt someone if you wanted the best for them; Zuko knew that.

_“He would not.”_

_How do **you** know? You don’t know him any better than I do._

_“I know what you know about him. But I also have some… perspective that you may lack.”_

_What is **that** supposed to mean?_

_“That I have the advantages of age, experience, and a certain distance from your situation.”_

_Experience with humans?_ Zuko scoffed. _You couldn’t tell if I had reached ‘reproductive maturity.’_

_“True, much about your bodies is strange to me. But I know your spirits, because they are of the same substance as mine. And I know your uncle will not harm you.”_

_You think I should tell him. Why?_

_“I believe he can help us. You need an earthbending teacher. How were you planning to find one?”_

_I don’t know. Find somewhere inhabited, but not occupied by Fire Nation forces, where they might have outlawed earthbending._

_“Why would anyone trust you, or agree to teach you, looking as you do?”_ He didn’t mean Zuko’s scar—for once—but his golden eyes and jet-black phoenix plume.

 _I would… get some green clothes. Cover my head. Say I’m from the colonies, and one of my parents is Fire Nation, but I’m an earthbender. I can show them._ It was easier to make his cup scoot across the floor now that he had figured out how to do it once.

_“Why should they believe your loyalties lie with your Earth Kingdom parent?”_

Zuko swallowed painfully. _The burn… I could say it was from my— my father, when he discovered I was an earthbender. So I ran away._ That was what an honorless peasant would do, right? Run away from pain.

Zuko felt Vaatu sigh with something between exasperation and pity. _“And what will you tell your uncle and your crew about why you are abandoning the North Pole, then leaving the ship to go hunting in the Earth Kingdom?”_

Zuko had actually thought about this one, as Vaatu surely knew, which made him wonder suspiciously where this line of questioning was leading. _I’ll say I’ve figured out that the Avatar can’t be in the Northern Water Tribe—that there’s never been an exception to the alternation between the two tribes in the reincarnation cycle. It’s not true, but no one else would know that. So we need to be looking for earthbenders—either the new Earth Avatar, or the Air Avatar’s earthbending master, or maybe their descendants._

_“All that is very well… but how will you explain to your uncle why you are staying with some earthbending master for months?”_

Zuko hadn’t really gotten that far… or rather, he hadn’t fully confronted the necessity that had been shadowing the back of his mind. _I’ll have to leave him behind_ , he finally allowed himself to acknowledge. _I’ll have to leave everyone. And… I can’t let them try to follow me. I’ll have to make them think I’m dead._

Vaatu let him sit with that thought for a few moments before he said mildly, matter-of-factly, _“Your uncle has already lost a son.”_

“I’m not—” Zuko started to snap out loud before he caught himself. _I’m not his son!_ He smacked the table with both hands and stood up to pace around the little room. _He doesn’t get to—to pretend he’s got Lu Ten back just because my father decided he didn’t want me… around anymore. I’m not a **replacement** , or a do-over._

 _“Of course not,”_ Vaatu said reasonably.

 _That’s the only reason why he came with me_ , Zuko insisted. _He doesn’t care about **me** that much. He doesn’t even know me. He was never around, always off on campaigns. Lu Ten was the one who knew me, brought gifts back in person, helped teach me swordfighting… _He wasn’t just a replacement for Lu Ten, Zuko realized; he was a link to him, to the years Iroh had missed while fighting the war. That’s why losing Zuko would be like losing Lu Ten all over again.

_I don’t **want** to do it, but I have to. It’s the only way I can learn the elements so **you’ll** tell me where the Avatar is._

_“It’s not the only way.”_

_Why, how do **you** think he’d react to being told I’m the new Avatar of darkness and chaos? _He paused. _What’s the ‘darkness’ bit about, anyway? You’ve only explained the ‘chaos’ part._

Vaatu sighed, long-suffering. _“Do you really want me to take the time to explain right now, or do you want to stop this ship sailing in the wrong direction through a minefield of ice?”_

_Fine, don’t explain now. But do tell me why you think Uncle Iroh would help me instead of leaving me—us—on one of these icebergs._

_“Because he understands the importance of balance,”_ Vaatu replied. _“Nothing is complete without its opposite: the day must be followed by the night, just as the mountains cannot exist without their valleys, and the tide that comes in must go out again—the eternal push and pull of opposing forces. We are needed to bring **true** balance to the world, you and I. As a man who has traveled among the spirits, learning their wisdom, your uncle will understand that.”_

Zuko considered this. Uncle Iroh had come back from the war… strange, pensive, loquacious as always but full of impenetrable proverbs rather than war stories or court gossip. He spoke of the spirits now more than he ever had; he even claimed to have spent a year traveling in the Spirit World. Zuko wasn’t sure he believed it… but apparently Vaatu (an actual ancient spirit) did, based on Zuko’s memory of his uncle’s fanciful stories.

_Okay, suppose you’re right. **How** could he help us?_

_“He has spent years in the Earth Kingdom; he knows it well.”_

_As an **enemy**_ , Zuko reminded him. _You think he was making friends with earthbending masters?_

_“Recall that he spent some time traveling incognito after he left the field. But even if he hadn’t… war is never as simple as you imagine, **Prince** Zuko. Even invaders can find allies who are unhappy with their current rulers, or who think they can secure some advantage by aiding their future rulers.”_

_Why can’t **you** find me an earthbending teacher, anyway?_, Zuko asked abruptly, as the thought occurred to him.

 _“How, exactly, would I do that?”_ Vaatu replied, finally showing some irritation after all his maddening patience.

 _How did you show me what was happening in Ba Sing Se?_ , Zuko challenged him back. _Somehow you can see what’s happening in the world… if you weren’t lying to me about all of that. Why can’t you find the Avatar anytime, even when he’s not in the Avatar State? And why can’t you find an earthbending master who would be willing to teach me?_

Vaatu made a thought-noise that resembled a growl; it rumbled in Zuko’s chest the way his hums and laughter did. _“I am a spirit that governs one of the fundamental principles of life. I can perceive… patterns, great movements of people, tendencies toward change or stagnation. I felt it when your people, the Fire Nation, invaded the Earth Kingdom and established colonies where blood and culture mix. I have felt it as the waterbenders of the South Pole dwindled, and I felt it when a whole people—the Air Nomads, as you call them—were wiped from existence, robbing the world of uncountable possibilities for the transformation and renewal that occur when cultures meet. I sense events and actions that occur over and over—like the actions I showed you. Actions that enforce an unchanging system, that build and maintain a dam across the river of time.”_

 _Do you want the Fire Nation to win the war?_ , Zuko asked him bluntly.

Even without a mouth to sneer, Vaatu was eloquent in communicating contempt. _“I do not care who ‘wins’ your foolish wars,”_ he said. _“I care about the changes they bring, the world that emerges as they recede. Will this flood leave the soil of human existence richer and more fertile, or wash away vital sources of nourishment? So far it has done some of each… but I need **you** , my Avatar, to ensure that it does not strip the earth bare.”_

Zuko wasn’t completely sure he knew what Vaatu was talking about, but at least he hadn’t said he wanted Zuko to betray the Fire Nation; the rest would have to be puzzled out later. _I’m going to tell Lieutenant Jee to change course_ , he announced.

_“What are you going to do about your uncle?”_

_I haven’t decided yet._

Zuko made his way up the command tower to the bridge where Lieutenant Jee sat with his charts, consulting with his navigation assistant, Ensign Li—one of two Ensign Lis on the _Wani_. Fortunately, they wrote their names with different characters that had different meanings, which they used to prevent the inevitable confusion… or it would have prevented confusion if the meanings of their names had not been so unsuited to their functions and talents. Defying all logic, the timid, bespectacled navigator was “Power Li,” while “Logic Li” worked under Engineer Hanako, his height and musculature supplementing the limitations of her diminutive stature.

“Lieutenant,” Zuko greeted Jee as he stepped through the doorway. “Set a new course back toward the Earth Kingdom.”

Lieutenant Jee stood up and turned around, looking alarmed; Power Li looked dumbfounded. “May I ask why the sudden change of course, Prince Zuko?” Jee asked with stiff politeness.

“I have concluded that the Avatar could not have been reborn in the Northern Water Tribe. Either a Southern Tribe Avatar has been killed and reborn in the Earth Kingdom, or the Air Nomad is still eluding us. Either way, the Earth Kingdom is the likeliest place to look.”

“Is it possible that an Avatar from the Southern Water Tribe might have escaped and taken refuge with their sister tribe in the North?” came Uncle Iroh’s voice from the doorway behind them. He must have seen Zuko heading for the stairs, or heard his (perhaps unnecessarily heavy) footsteps climbing them.

“It’s possible,” Zuko said shortly, “but unlikely.”

“Unlikely enough that you prefer to turn around when we are so close to the North Pole?” Uncle Iroh wasn’t arguing with him—Zuko knew he didn’t believe it was possible to find the Avatar at all, so of course he had no opinion on where it would be most sensible to look—but he wanted to understand what Zuko was thinking.

“Unlikely enough that I don’t want to waste time and risk ship damage navigating this ice field,” Zuko said, trying to project decisive certainty.

“Where in the Earth Kingdom should I set our heading for?” Lieutenant Jee asked.

“Back toward the Northern Air Temple. From there we’ll sail east along the coast toward Chameleon Bay.” There were towns along the coast, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se… and perhaps it would still be worthwhile to visit the Eastern Air Temple, to see if he could find traces of the other Avatar.

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Jee with a nod.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Zuko, nodding curtly in acknowledgment. He turned to go back down the stairs toward his quarters. His uncle followed him.

“Have you discovered something new, Prince Zuko?” he asked, too innocently.

“Not exactly,” Zuko said brusquely. “I went through all the historical records and determined that the Avatar has never been incarnated into the same Water Tribe twice in a row—it’s always alternated between the Southern and Northern Tribes, for as long as they’ve been divided.”

“Very interesting. Even though the Northern Tribe is so much larger?”

“Yes.”

They stopped in front of the door of Zuko’s cabin. Iroh could tell something was going on and was waiting for Zuko to crack and tell him.

 _“Stop being foolish,”_ Vaatu hissed.

“Excuse me, Uncle,” said Zuko, giving him a slight bow, before he went through the door to his cabin and closed it behind him.

 _“What good do you think this will do?”_ Vaatu demanded.

 _I don’t know. I_ _just need time to think._

 _“What more is there to think about?”_ Zuko had the mental image of Vaatu pacing in the hollow of his tree, some long slender appendage lashing like a cat’s tail.

 _I’m afraid, all right?_ , Zuko snapped. He exhaled sharply and saw a cloud of steam form in front of his nose. He closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, trying to calm himself. _I’m afraid of what he’ll think, what he’ll say, what he’ll do. I'm afraid he’ll think this is worse than if I’d died. Maybe he’d rather think I was dead._

 _“Zuko… I think you’re confusing your uncle with your father,”_ Vaatu said, his agitation replaced once more by exasperated pity.

 _They are brothers_ , Zuko pointed out.

_“And Azula is your sister.”_

Zuko sighed and leaned his head against the wall with a quiet _thunk_.

 _“Do you regret our bargain?”_ Vaatu asked—not angry or threatening, just with mild curiosity, maybe even a touch of sadness.

 _No._ He paused. _I don’t know._ He pushed himself away from the wall and sat down at his desk, staring at the scattered scrolls and papers. _I still need to find the Avatar. And you’re my best shot at that. Even if I need my uncle to think I’m dead for a while._

_“Think it over, Zuko. But know that I believe you’re misjudging him.”_

Vaatu retreated into silence while Zuko studied his maps of the Earth Kingdom’s eastern coast, looking for harbors where he might be able to put ashore discreetly, concealing the _Wani’_ s presence from patrolling navy ships. He lingered over the little dots representing towns along the coast or just inland, committing their names to memory… but ultimately the names were meaningless to him. He knew nothing about any of these towns, about how many earthbending masters lived there, or how welcoming they were to strangers, or how they would receive a golden-eyed, fire-scarred thirteen-year-old boy. He would have to cut his hair, he acknowledged morosely; the phoenix plume would be far too conspicuous.

* * *

For days as the _Wani_ retraced its path through the ice-strewn waters, Zuko said nothing to his uncle. He still had his firebending training in the mornings, of course, and Uncle Iroh gently prodded at him, asking if he was sleeping all right, or if he was in pain… more than usual, that is. Zuko tried not to sound too irritable when he insisted that he was fine, or he would only feed his uncle’s suspicions.

He took his morning and midday meals in his own quarters, but (perhaps out of the habit instilled by his mother) ate the evening meal in the ship’s mess room below decks. The ship was small enough not to have separate dining rooms for officers and crew; they tended to sort themselves into different halves of the room, but Uncle sometimes mingled with the ordinary sailors and firebending soldiers to hear their stories… and flirt a little with the more attractive young-to-middle-aged women.

In the days following Zuko’s announced change of course, however, Iroh stayed close to his nephew, who sat consistently with the people he (more or less) knew: Lieutenant Jee, his first mate Sub-Lieutenant Somsak, Ensign Power Li the navigator, Doctor (and ex-Lieutenant) Tulang, and his assistant Shun, who had accompanied Zuko and Iroh from the palace. Tulang had his fair share of hair-raising tales from his days in the Navy (Shun sometimes had to gently prompt him to save some of the grislier medical details for when they _weren’t_ eating), and Uncle himself never ran out of Spirit World adventure stories of dubious veracity.

At dinner on the fourth day since Zuko had joined with Vaatu, Uncle was telling of a frightening encounter with Koh the Face-Stealer, who (as his name promised) would steal your face if you failed to keep it perfectly passive and emotionless in his presence. Zuko reflected that he would probably be doomed… but his face as it was now would not be such a terrible loss.

 _“Koh cannot give you a new face; that is his mother’s province,”_ Vaatu contributed in response to that thought. _“He would leave you without eyes or a mouth, unseeing, unbreathing, in a living death.”_

 _His mother… the Mother of Faces?_ Vaatu confirmed this with a hum.

The Mother of Faces was Vaatu and Raava’s daughter, so Koh was their grandson… if such relationships were recognized among spirits. And that thought gave Zuko an idea.

Once Iroh had finished recounting how he told Koh the funniest joke he knew while keeping a completely straight face—reducing everyone at the table to convulsions and tears of laughter, except Zuko, who hadn’t really been listening—Zuko turned to his uncle and asked: “Have you heard of a spirit called Raava?”

Iroh wiped his streaming eyes, cleared his throat, and replied, his voice still hoarse with laughter, “Raava? No, I don’t know that name.”

“It’s the name of the Avatar spirit… or so I’ve read. She’s the spirit of peace, or of order, but the first Avatar separated her from the counterpart she was born with—the spirit of chaos—and merged with her so that she could hold the power to bend more than one element.”

Iroh’s face had grown serious, while the others at the table either looked skeptical or (in the case of the first mate and Power Li, who had little patience for spirit tales) had stopped listening and turned away to their own conversations.

“I have never heard that story,” said Iroh. “Are you saying that the first Avatar… kidnapped this spirit for his own purposes?”

“Not exactly, no. She agreed to join with him to fight the spirit of chaos, and together they imprisoned him.”

Iroh frowned. “That is odd. Spirits who come into existence together, as opposing principles, do not usually permit themselves to be separated. The Moon and Ocean spirits dwell together; the spirits of Summer and Winter chasing each other around the year, the spirits of Sky and Earth eternally embracing…”

“Well, Raava did, and she trapped her counterpart in the Tree of Time.”

Iroh’s eyes narrowed, and some faint light of recognition flickered in them. “Imprisoned inside a tree?”

“That’s what this source said, anyway. It might just be a fable, or a complete invention by the author. I just wanted to know if you’d heard anything about this in your travels through the Spirit World.”

“No, never.”

Zuko shrugged. “Probably an invention, then.” But Iroh looked troubled rather than dismissive.

They finished eating and Zuko returned to his quarters to meditate before bed… but as he was lighting his four candles, he heard a knock at his door. “Yes?” he barked out.

“It’s your uncle,” came a muffled voice, echoing through the metal hallway. Zuko had already known that, of course.

He got up to open the door. “May I come in?” Uncle Iroh asked.

“Sure,” Zuko said, trying to sound casual, though his stomach twisted with anxiety. With a gesture he extinguished the candles and with another he lit the lamps on the walls instead.

“I am sorry that I have interrupted your meditation,” said Iroh, kneeling on the mats beside Zuko’s low bench.

“It’s fine. I can do it after you leave. What did you want?”

Uncle Iroh was accustomed to Zuko’s bluntness; if he was offended, he gave no sign. “The story you told at dinner, about the first Avatar and the Avatar spirit. Where did you read it?”

And now Zuko had little choice but to tell the truth. “I didn’t read it,” he admitted. His hands were trembling, and he hoped his uncle couldn’t hear the slight tremor in his voice. “I was told the story by a spirit trapped in a tree between this world and the Spirit World.”

Iroh’s eyes widened—not only with shock, but also, it seemed, with dread. “How did you encounter this spirit?” he asked, and his voice was trembling, too.

“I was meditating, and then I found myself in front of the tree in this place between the worlds. I think maybe it was the diviners’ sage—I chewed some of the leaves before meditating, like the old herbalist woman said to do, and I think that’s what enabled my mind to travel between worlds.”

“And you met the spirit of chaos there.”

“Yes. Vaatu.”

“Is it possible he might have been lying to you about Raava and the Avatar?” Uncle Iroh asked gently, carefully.

“It’s possible,” Zuko admitted. “But I don’t think he was. He wants to be with her again—like you said; most spirits don’t want to be separated from their opposite. He can sense her presence, but he couldn’t escape the tree to rejoin her.” His voice was trembling more than ever; there was no hope of hiding it.

“Zuko, what have you done?” Iroh whispered. “What have _I_ …?”

Zuko didn’t understand why his uncle would blame himself… but he remembered that Iroh was the one who had been searching high and low for pain remedies that could prevent Zuko from becoming dependent on opium. Iroh had found that herbalist in the mountains, and had encouraged Zuko to eat the herb that had transported him to the vestibule of the Spirit World.

“I’m not crazy,” said Zuko. “I can prove I’m not crazy. Look.” He fixed his attention on the earthenware cup beside his bed and stretched a hand out toward it. For a few tense seconds nothing happened, but he redoubled his focus and it started to creep toward him across the floor, then he flexed his fingers in a beckoning motion and it sailed into his hand, drops of water sloshing over the side onto his makeshift altar.

Zuko looked up at his uncle in triumph, and Uncle Iroh stared back, stricken, silent.

Zuko’s brief feeling of triumph faded and his anxiety resurged. “I know air is supposed to be next, after fire, but we’re taking Raava’s cycle backwards, so earth is first. I haven’t tried to bend water yet, but…” He set the cup down on the floor between him and Iroh and waited for the small amount of water in it to stop sloshing, then tried to summon it with a wrist movement that sort of felt right. The water sloshed a little more, but that could have been just the motion of the ship. Zuko did the wrist movement again, with both hands this time, and a tiny wave rose above the rim of the cup and then splashed back down.

“How is this possible?” Iroh asked hoarsely. “The power to bend the elements was granted by the Lion-Turtles, before the four nations came to dwell together in the same lands. How could the spirit of chaos—how could _any_ spirit grant this ability?”

Zuko frowned. “I don’t know, actually. I didn’t know that about the Lion-Turtles.”

 _“I did not grant it,”_ said Vaatu. _“I merely unlocked a potential that was already there.”_

“He says he didn’t grant it, just unlocked a potential that was already there,” Zuko dutifully repeated.

“He— he speaks to you? You hear his voice?”

“He sort of… lives inside me. Here”—Zuko tapped his forehead—“and here”—he laid a palm on his chest.

“And he can hear me?” Iroh asked, obviously trying to control his expressions of horror. Zuko started worrying again about being abandoned on an iceberg… or having the spirit burned out of him. He wrapped his arms around himself, as a self-protective reflex.

“He hears what I hear, and sees what I see,” Zuko said. _And smells what I smell, presumably…_

_“Don’t underestimate the informative power of smell.”_

“What is the… potential that this spirit—Vaatu—unlocked?” Iroh asked apprehensively.

_“The four nations are not nearly as separate as Raava would like you to think—they have not been for ten thousand years. The blood of all four nations flows in the veins of the great majority of humanity. And for all the pride your people take in their supposed ‘purity,’ the Fire Nation is the most thoroughly mixed of all. You have ancestors who bent all four elements. Without a bonded spirit to hold the power of the other elements for you, each individual can only control one, and your firebending ancestry overpowers your more distant ancestors of other nations. But anyone who can bend one element—the element of the nation to which they supposedly belong— **could** bend all the others that they have inherited in their blood, if they were bonded to a spirit like me or Raava.”_

This was news to Zuko: he knew that many in the Fire Nation were descended from Earth Kingdom migrants (Master Piandao’s brown skin and gray-green eyes hinted at such an origin), but he had always thought that his line, Agni’s line, had kept itself pure and unmixed—at least until Iroh married a daughter of one of the newer houses, which had brought its wealth from the Earth Kingdom three centuries before and raised itself to nobility by rendering service to the Dragon Throne. But Zuko realized that he did not even know the names of his mother’s parents; he had thought Ozai would disdain to ally himself with ‘new money,’ as he sneeringly dismissed his sister-in-law’s kin.

Zuko relayed Vaatu’s explanation to his uncle. This, at least, did not seem to surprise him; he simply nodded his understanding.

“And you, Zuko… you agreed to this—bond with Vaatu?” Iroh looked intently into Zuko’s eyes, so intently that Zuko wanted to look away, and put a hand on Zuko’s hand, resting on the low bench where he sat. Zuko flinched at his touch, still fearing some drastic attempt to cast Vaatu out of him, and Iroh pulled his hand away, quickly but deliberately—a reassurance that he did not mean to frighten or harm his nephew.

“Yes,” Zuko said firmly, forcing himself to meet his uncle’s worried eyes.

“Why?”

Zuko looked down at his lap. “Because he told me he can sense Raava. He can tell me where the Avatar is, so I can capture him. And come home.”

“Has he told you where to find the Avatar?” Iroh asked, sounding more worried than ever.

“No,” Zuko said shortly, looking up with a disgruntled frown. “He says he won’t tell me until I’ve learned to bend the other elements—earth and water. The Avatar—the _other_ Avatar is the only one who can teach me airbending. But Vaatu wants us to be more _‘evenly matched’_ before I meet him.” He directed a glare vaguely upward, toward his own head.

“That is… remarkably sensible,” said Iroh.

“It’s _what?”_ Zuko’s jaw dropped in stunned betrayal.

“Sensible,” Iroh repeated, though he surely knew that Zuko had heard him just fine. “If the last airbender is still alive—and you know that he is?—he has had one hundred years to master the elements. You should at least learn as many as you can before you attempt to confront him.”

Zuko stared at him with wide eyes. “So you’re not… angry? Horrified? You’re not going to try to— to burn him out of me, exorcise him…?”

Uncle Iroh closed his eyes in what seemed like pain, and they were glistening when he opened them again. “No, Zuko. I would _never_ hurt you.” He put one hand on Zuko’s shoulder, gripped it firmly, looked into his eyes again with that burning, almost frightening intensity. “ _Never._ Do you hear me? And with fire…” The hand that gripped his shoulder tightened spasmodically, his fingers digging in almost painfully… but it was worlds away from his father’s iron grip, heated to leave blistering welts, or wrenching hard enough to make bones creak together and muscles scream in protest.

“Will you help me, then?” Zuko dared to ask in a hoarse whisper.

“I will try to help you however I can,” Iroh promised.

“Can you help me find an earthbending master?”

Iroh blinked in surprise… then a smile slowly spread across his face. “Yes, Prince Zuko, I think I can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had an "oh shit" moment when AvocadoLove posted a new fic ([Consider the Earth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25574365/chapters/62063359)) dealing with the issue of how Zuko could acquire the power to bend the other elements, when Wan originally got the various abilities from the lion-turtles. Then I had a brainwave related to my headcanon about different ethnic groups in the Fire Nation (ask me about that in comments if you're interested).
> 
> The firebending forms were inspired by the forms of the Chinese martial art Xing Yi Quan, which (according to the Avatar Wiki) was one of the sources of inspiration for firebending in the show.


	3. The Way to Omashu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Iroh tells Zuko where he can find a bending master; Zuko, Iroh, the doctor, and his assistant prepare to travel undercover in the Earth Kingdom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven't updated this in almost 4 months... there was a ship week, and the stuff I was writing for that got kind of out of hand, and then there was a ship zine, and (most relevantly) it was term time and I was recording two lectures per week most weeks while still dealing with long-haul Covid symptoms, which were made worse by the lecturing. But the term is over now, and I'm taking partial sick leave next semester (which I should have done this semester) to actually give myself time to recover, so I'll have more time to write fic. Yay!
> 
> Sushi the mimic catopus (property of MuffinLance) makes an appearance in this chapter... her last appearance for a while, I'm afraid.

Zuko instantly sat up straighter. “You _can?”_

Vaatu made a smug noise in his head. _Don’t you start_ , Zuko thought at him.

“I am a member of a… a club, one might say, of Pai Sho enthusiasts, whose membership crosses national boundaries.”

“You’re in an international _Pai Sho club?”_ Zuko repeated. He’d known Uncle Iroh was… eccentric, but that sounded weird even for him.

“In a manner of speaking. And as it happens, one of my contacts in this club is an earthbending master of some renown.”

“Where?” Zuko pressed.

“He lives in Omashu.”

One of the places Zuko had seen in the candle flames—he felt even more confident now that the diviners’ sage had shown him glimpses of his destiny. “You’re sure he _still_ lives there?” he asked Iroh anxiously.

“Oh, quite sure,” said Iroh with a strangely amused smile.

“Then I’ll tell Lieutenant Jee first thing tomorrow morning to plot a course for Omashu.”

“Excellent! I have long desired to visit that great city and see its wonders—almost as dearly as the magnificent city of Ba Sing Se. Did you know that it has a system of mail distribution operated entirely by earthbending?”

“Which, Omashu or Ba Sing Se?”

“Omashu, of course! It is built on the slopes of a mountain, so the earthbenders lift earthen boxes of mail to the top and send them down stone chutes to their destinations.”

“Uh… interesting,” said Zuko, unenthusiastically.

“I can tell that you are tired, nephew. I’ll let you get back to your meditation, and then to bed.”

“Thank you, Uncle,” said Zuko. After a pause, he put his arms around his uncle and hugged him tight. “Thank you for… for keeping me.”

“Oh, Zuko,” Iroh said thickly. “I will stay with you until you no longer want me… and even then, you might find me hard to get rid of.”

Zuko finally released his uncle and stood to open the door for him. “Good night, Prince Zuko,” he said from the other side of the doorway.

“Good night, Uncle,” said Zuko, and made an effort to close the door more softly than he usually did.

_“It would be ungracious to say ‘I told you so,’ but…”_

_Like you care about being ‘gracious.’_

_“Again, not as such… but I do have an interest in maintaining a productive working relationship with my human partner.”_

_So I’m your ‘partner,’ huh? Not just your vessel or your vehicle or whatever?_

_“I can’t accomplish much without your cooperation, now, can I?”_

_That would be true of an ostrich-horse, too._

_“You’re a remarkably talkative and independent-minded ostrich-horse.”_

_Uh… thanks, I guess?_

Vaatu just chuckled, and Zuko felt it again as a low vibration in his chest. It felt good; maybe he ought to make Vaatu laugh more often… and he chuckled again at that thought, intensifying the vibration.

 _“That’s what’s known as mutualistic symbiosis,”_ Vaatu remarked.

Zuko relit his candles to meditate. He had dutifully drunk his birch leaf tea, but he forwent the sage leaves tonight; he didn’t need any more unexpected adventures in the Spirit World.

Vaatu remained silent during the hour that Zuko spent counting his deep breaths and feeling the candle flames breathe in time with him. He could still feel Vaatu’s attentive, curious presence—like the ship’s mimic catopus (somewhat morbidly named Sushi), when she crouched in the corner of the room with her tentapaws tucked under her, watching him, keeping him company at a courteous distance.

Zuko finished meditating and washed up for bed. He had just settled in under his piles of blankets when Vaatu said, _“I do hope you’ll take this as evidence that you can trust my judgments of character.”_

_So much for not saying ‘I told you so’…_

_“I **didn’t** say that.”_

_Uh-huh. Good night, Vaatu._

_“Sleep well, Prince Zuko.”_

It was the first time Vaatu had used his title in a non-mocking way. Zuko wondered if he was deliberately emulating Uncle Iroh, who seemed to use it in subtle defiance of Ozai’s decree.

Zuko did not sleep well. Instead, he dreamed that when he told his uncle that he was the new Avatar of the Spirit of Chaos, Iroh grew stern and angry. “You’ve joined with a dark spirit? Even in disgrace, you are still the crown prince of the Fire Nation! This will endanger our war effort, even the homeland itself!” Iroh stood and glowered down at him, trembling with rage, while Zuko shrank away. They were in a dimly lit room full of people, sitting around a long rectangular table, and Zuko knew that the figure sitting in shadow behind a curtain of flame was his father.

“You have dishonored yourself, the royal house, and your whole nation!” Iroh thundered on. “There is only one solution,” he said, his voice softer now, its anger edged with sorrow and pity.

“Uncle, please,” Zuko whispered.

He hadn’t even noticed the change of scene, but now he was kneeling on a long blood-red mat in a courtyard that was open to the bright morning sky. “Please,” he said, “I am your loyal son,” as a hand came slowly toward his face, almost gentle in its approach. The arm it was attached to seemed too hard and muscular to belong to Uncle Iroh, but his gaze was frozen on the hand, he couldn’t look up to see who was saying, “You will learn…”

 _“Zuko,”_ said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and not to belong to this place at all. It reverberated through his head and chest, dark as the underwater mouths of sleeping volcanoes he had explored around the shores of Ember Island as a child. _“Zuko, wake up.”_

As soon as the command was uttered, Zuko obeyed. He opened his eyes into the perpetual twilight-dawn dimness of his cabin on the _Wani_. The thrum of the engines was constant here, where there was always enough light that someone could be carefully steering the ship between the icy barriers.

 _Vaatu?_ Zuko thought at the presence in his head.

_“Yes?”_

_Did you wake me up?_

_“Yes, I did.”_

_Why?_

_“I could tell that your dream was about to become especially unpleasant, and I didn’t think either of us needed to experience that.”_

Zuko took a moment to digest that response, then, a little grudgingly, he thought, _Thank you._

 _“Think nothing of it,”_ said Vaatu (an interesting choice for saying ‘You’re welcome,’ under the circumstances).

But of course Zuko couldn’t help thinking of it, and Vaatu knew that. Graciously (despite his protestations not to care about such things), he said nothing more about it. Instead, after a few minutes of silence, he started humming, apparently to himself, some strange, haunting melody that must have been, that _felt_ , ancient beyond measure. The humming vibrated soothingly in Zuko’s chest much like Vaatu’s laughter. Mutualistic symbiosis, indeed.

Zuko couldn’t sense exactly what time it was the way he could in places where the sun actually rose and set, but he did feel tired enough that he thought he could sleep another hour or two… and unlike the other early mornings when he had been woken by a nightmare—most often of that same terrible day—he was not afraid to go back to sleep, because now he knew that he would be awakened before he was forced to relive the worst moment of the worst day of his life.

As Zuko closed his eyes to go back to sleep, he felt Vaatu’s watchful presence, perhaps not for the first time but certainly more strongly than ever, as a comforting guardian rather than an intrusive nuisance or a burden.

* * *

Zuko gave Lieutenant Jee the new heading first thing the next morning. He expected Jee to ask _why_ they were suddenly going to Omashu—how he had found a new lead in the middle of an ice field, and why he couldn’t have figured it out _before_ they entered it—but he was remarkably incurious. Zuko suspected that Jee thought the whole mission was a pointless waste of fuel, so he didn’t care much in what direction they were wasting it, and was just glad they were going back toward somewhere warmer.

Once the _Wani_ was out of polar waters, sailing toward Omashu proceeded much more expeditiously. Fortunately, they did not have to sail all the way back around the northwestern coast of the Earth Kingdom; instead, they could sail through a strait between Pohuai Stronghold and the first Fire Nation colony, Yu Dao, to reach the Western Ocean just north of the equator.

It was an immeasurable comfort and relief to Zuko that he could seek Uncle Iroh’s advice about his plans rather than having to plot around him, concealing from him the complex and weighty mission that Zuko would otherwise have had to wrestle with alone. He thought he could sense a hint of smugness from Vaatu’s silent presence whenever this feeling of relief washed over him, but in keeping with his declared intention not to say ‘I told you so,’ he held his silence.

“We’ll have to leave the crew behind,” Zuko said, thinking aloud over a game of Pai Sho, frowning and fidgeting antsily with a captured tile. Zuko didn’t really enjoy these weekly games, but Uncle Iroh insisted that it was essential for a prince to learn how to develop, execute, and fluidly adapt a complex strategy… and Zuko knew how much his uncle enjoyed playing, and how few members of the crew had any interest at all, so Zuko humored him. He seldom won a game, unless Iroh was deliberately handicapping himself in some way (and Zuko could tell when he was refraining from using a particular tile or move), but he must have been improving in spite of himself: whereas three months ago he would be obliterated in twenty minutes, now he was managing to drag the games out to an hour or even two. Which was not exactly the outcome he’d wanted… but he knew Uncle would be able to tell if he was losing on purpose, and anyway, Zuko’s own pride would not allow him to intentionally play worse than he actually could. Even if he didn’t want to be doing something, he always gave it his best shot.

“I’ll tell them I’m following a lead inland, and secrecy is paramount. No one would think anything of two war refugees, an old man and his young nephew, seeking safety behind the walls of Omashu; we’d be able to travel unnoticed.”

 _“Old?”_ Uncle Iroh repeated, looking wounded. “A man of fifty is not _old_ —regardless of what my hair color may be telling you.” He paused. “And my figure.”

Zuko sighed. “Fine, a _middle-aged_ man. I’ll have to tell Lieutenant Jee to take the ship somewhere safe—the colonies, probably—to wait for my word. Though I’m not sure how I’ll get word to them, it would _definitely_ be suspicious if a pair of Earth Kingdom war refugees had a Fire Nation messenger hawk…”

“Not just _a pair_ , nephew. Doctor Tulang must come with us—and perhaps it is best if Shun also comes along; the presence of a young woman may make the people of the Earth Kingdom less suspicious than a group of three men, even if two are _middle-aged_ and one is very young…”

Zuko set the tile he was fiddling with down on the table harder than he’d meant to; the loud _clack_ it made even surprised him a little. “You want to bring them with us? What are we supposed to tell _them_ about why I’m staying in Omashu with an earthbending master?”

“The truth, of course.”

Zuko’s jaw dropped. “Are you joking?”

“Not at all.”

“Then are you _insane?”_

“You told _me_ , didn’t you?”

“Yes, I told you—because you’re my uncle, and my firebending master, and you didn’t have to come with me into exile but you did anyway.” He paused. “And because Vaatu thought I should. And wouldn’t shut up about it.”

 _“Thank you for sharing credit,”_ came Vaatu’s voice, for the first time since he had sat down to the game with his uncle (Vaatu had not seen fit to advise him on the game). _“I think you should learn to play on your own,”_ he said in response to the stray thought that Zuko hadn’t meant to communicate to him. _“Your uncle is right; strategic thinking is very important.”_

_You’re very rule-abiding for a spirit of chaos._

_“Nothing of the sort,”_ Vaatu sniffed. _“My concerns are purely instrumental.”_

Zuko thought that his uncle looked a little saddened, or disappointed, to learn that trusting him had been Vaatu’s instinct rather than Zuko’s. “Well, then,” Iroh said, trying to sound lighthearted. “What does Vaatu think you should do about Doctor Tulang and Shun?”

 _“Bring them along,”_ Vaatu answered immediately. _“You are not yet fully healed; I do not want my vessel weakened by pain or fever or unnecessary overexertion.”_

_So now I’m your vessel again? What happened to ‘partner’?_

_“Your spirit is my partner; your body is my vessel— **our** vessel—and that is my present concern.”_

_And you think I should tell them about you? How do you think **they** will react?_

_“I think Shun will listen to your uncle’s reasons and respect them. I expect the good doctor will be extremely skeptical, but will eventually take this in stride, as he has many other strange things over his long career.”_

Uncle Iroh waited patiently during this silent consultation. At last Zuko said, his reluctance plain in his voice, “He agrees with you.”

Iroh nodded, a tad smugly. “Again, very sensible.”

 _You happy?_ Zuko thought sourly. _You’ve met with my uncle’s approval._

 _“I am not displeased,”_ Vaatu said archly.

Zuko was still subjected to regular examinations by Doctor Tulang while his burns continued to heal—but the frequency had been steadily decreasing as the healing process progressed, and it was now down to once weekly. Iroh had stopped accompanying Zuko to these examinations after the first month (when Zuko had snapped at him that he didn’t need his uncle holding his hand), so Tulang and Shun were both surprised to see him at the one that took place two days after the discussion over Pai Sho.

“Prince Iroh,” the doctor greeted him with a brisk nod (he had learned by now not to address Iroh as ‘General’) while Shun stood up from where she was sitting, readying supplies on a low table, to bow to both princes. “I wasn’t expecting a visit. Is something the matter?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Iroh.

“You know I prefer the _plain_ manner of speaking, so spit it out.” Tulang had little respect for rank—or rather, his respect was expressed in frankness without regard for rank.

“I think it is best if Prince Zuko explains.”

Tulang’s sharp gaze shot over to Zuko, who had been standing quietly, staring at the floor and dreading everything that was to come. “Is something wrong, boy?” Tulang asked, his tone businesslike but not unkind.

Zuko raised his eyes first to Shun. She was part of the palace medical team who had treated him (and probably saved his life, he acknowledged uneasily) after he was burned three months ago; she was of humble origins, the daughter of palace servants, but she spoke to him without fear and trusted him with the truth, as adults so seldom did, and for that she had earned _his_ trust. Shun gave him a reassuring half-smile, and Zuko steeled himself and met the doctor’s gaze. “Not exactly,” he said.

Tulang frowned and opened his mouth, probably to order the royals to stop being so damned cryptic, but Zuko continued in a rush, “We’re going on a mission in Omashu and we need you to come along. You and Shun.”

Tulang exchanged a surprised look with his assistant. “Omashu, hmm? What’s in Omashu? Other than the mail system.”

Was this something all old people knew about? Zuko wondered. No one had ever bothered to tell him. “A great earthbending master,” he said.

“What, and you think he was the Avatar’s earthbending master? Or is he the Avatar?” Tulang asked. His tone wasn’t sarcastic, exactly, but Zuko could tell he was dubious about any such prospects.

“Not as far as I know,” said Zuko. “But… _I_ need an earthbending master.”

The look Tulang and Shun exchanged this time was outright mystified. “Why?” Tulang asked bluntly. “You can’t earthbend.”

Zuko looked up at Iroh, who nodded encouragingly. “Actually… I can.”

Tulang blinked a few times and then burst out laughing. Shun, of course, did not; her eyes widened, and her face was completely serious. “Don’t tell me _you’re_ the Avatar,” Tulang scoffed.

“Not _the_ Avatar… but _an_ Avatar. Sort of.”

“Don’t dance around it, just explain,” the doctor snapped.

“I’ve bonded with another spirit—like the Avatar Spirit, but… her counterpart. Her opposite.”

“I didn’t know the Avatar Spirit _had_ an opposite.”

“Many of the most ancient spirits do,” said Iroh, finally coming to Zuko’s aid.

“This is the spirit of chaos that you spoke of?” Shun said suddenly, recollection dawning on her face. “The one trapped in the Tree of Time?”

Zuko nodded. Shun’s mouth opened in shock and she drew in a quiet breath.

“Show me,” said Tulang, predictably. “Earthbend.”

Zuko nodded again. He looked around for something in the room that was made of earth, and most of what he found were jars and pots of various medicaments, which he didn’t want to risk spilling… but then his eyes alit on an empty stone mortar and pestle. He stretched out a hand toward the granite pestle, picturing how it must have cooled slowly in the heart of the earth, turning from liquid fire to fine hard crystals; he felt it as frozen fire and called it to him. It trembled at first against the mortar, tapping out a stuttering rhythm, then flew into his outstretched hand.

Zuko turned to Tulang and Shun in triumph and found their eyes wide and mouths open, Tulang’s in disbelief, Shun’s in what looked almost like terror.

“Impossible,” Tulang said tightly.

“Evidently not,” Iroh gently pointed out.

“What will you do?” Shun asked abruptly. “If you’re the Avatar of Chaos, what will you do with your new power?”

“I… I still want to find the other Avatar so that I can regain my honor… and go home. But Vaatu—the chaos spirit—won’t tell me where he is until I’ve learned to bend the other elements—earth, then water. But I’ll need to find the other Avatar if I’m going to learn airbending, because he’s the last airbender. Or she,” he added.

“All right,” said Shun. “But once you’ve learned all the elements, once you’ve found the Avatar—the other Avatar—what will you do? Will you help the Fire Nation win the war? Or will you try to bring chaos to the world, somehow?”

Zuko blinked; even Iroh had not asked this (fairly obvious) question. “I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “I don’t know what Vaatu wants me to do… and I don’t _have_ to do what he wants. Though he can get pretty annoying when I don’t…”

 _“All in good time,”_ said Vaatu. _“In time, it will become clear what you must do.”_

“He says it will become clear in time,” Zuko repeated.

“Damned spirit nonsense,” Tulang muttered. “Always clear as mud.”

“But what does he _want?”_ Shun pressed. “Just… more war forever? Anarchy?”

Zuko could answer this one on Vaatu’s behalf—at least, he thought he could. “Not exactly,” he said. “He says he doesn’t care who wins our stu— our wars. He just wants to make sure change is always possible—that societies don’t get stuck in one place, one way of doing things, forever.”

“Even if they have found the best way?” she asked, frowning.

Vaatu laughed in Zuko’s head—he was tempted to describe it as ‘uproarious’, especially compared to his usual muted chuckles. _“There is no such thing,”_ he scoffed. _“For the same way of life to be the best for all peoples, for all time… even for a single people for all time! The idea is absurd.”_

“He says there’s no such thing as ‘the best way’” was all Zuko relayed; he decided not to report the derision.

“Are you talking to him right _now?”_ Tulang asked in consternation.

Zuko nodded. “He lives in my head.”

Tulang frowned. “If I hadn’t just seen you earthbend, I would think you needed to be sent to a peaceful retreat in the mountains.”

“A madhouse, you mean,” Zuko said shortly.

“Not to put too fine a point on it…”

“You believe the Avatar is real, don’t you?” Zuko demanded.

“Of course. The historical evidence is unquestionable.”

“Well, the Avatar was new once, too. And maybe people thought _he_ was crazy when he said he’d bonded with a spirit and could bend all four elements. But he was reincarnated so many times, and so many people encountered his reincarnations, that now nobody doubts it. Maybe I’ll have hundreds of reincarnations, too—me and Vaatu—and then no one will doubt that he’s real.”

Tulang put his hands up in surrender before the force of Zuko’s indignation. “I don’t doubt you,” Shun said quietly.

“I know,” Zuko said, feeling the fire in his stomach subsiding. “Thank you for that.”

“Are you willing to come with us?” Iroh asked seriously, looking at the doctor and his assistant in turn.

“To help you learn earthbending and become a fully realized chaos Avatar—and then what? For what purpose? You can’t tell us,” Tulang directed at Zuko, and punctuated his challenge by folding his arms.

“I can still be a champion for the Fire Nation,” Zuko insisted. “The other Avatar threatens our nation’s interests; I can be there to oppose him, to counter his power.”

Zuko heard Vaatu sigh in his head, sounding long-suffering. _What?_ Zuko thought at him sharply.

_“You and your ‘nations.’ How many times must I say I don't care about their ‘interests’?”_

_Well, I do,_ Zuko retorted.

When he returned his attention to the other human beings in the room, they were all watching him expectantly. “What?” he asked again, this time aloud.

“I asked how protecting the Fire Nation’s interests advances the cause of your chaos spirit,” Tulang said impatiently.

 _“It doesn’t,”_ said Vaatu, and Zuko sighed in annoyance and repeated, “It doesn’t. But I have the power to bend all the elements now and I’m steering this ship. So Vaatu can complain all he wants but I’m still loyal to my nation.”

Tulang’s face, with his eyebrows raised and the corners of his mouth pulled down, very expressively communicated something along the lines of _‘This whole situation is completely absurd, but within those absurd parameters that makes perfect sense.’_

“I will come with you,” said Shun.

Tulang looked over at her, eyebrows still raised. “Eh, what the hell?” he said. “A quiet retirement was never really an option; might as well make an adventure of it.”

“Excellent!” Iroh brought his hands together in delight, then formed them into the proper flame shape and bowed. “I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to both of you—again.”

Zuko took the cue and also bowed, as deeply as his uncle had. “Thank you,” he said to both of them, but it was Shun’s eyes that he met as he straightened again. She held his gaze steadily for a moment—a reassurance that she would keep doing what she could to protect him, despite her own apprehension and uncertainty—before she appropriately lowered her eyes in deference.

“How’d _you_ get involved in all this, anyway?” Tulang asked Iroh. “You didn’t guide him into the Spirit World, did you?”

Iroh looked uneasy at the question—even guilty. “It’s not his fault,” Zuko put in quickly just as Iroh was opening his mouth to respond. “It was the diviners’ sage that allowed me to enter the Spirit World, on the solstice—but Uncle couldn’t have known. That herbalist woman on the mountain, she must have known… not that _this_ would happen, exactly, but that the herb could have that effect. I just told Uncle Iroh first, is all.” He looked over at his uncle, who still looked uneasy, but did not contest this explanation. “I was going to try to deal with it on my own… but Vaatu convinced me to seek my uncle’s help.”

“Interesting. Your chaos spirit doesn’t want you to go it alone?”

 _“I’m the spirit of chaos, not of idiocy,”_ Vaatu huffed.

Zuko decided not to relay that one. “No. He thought I should trust Uncle, and you.”

“Trust, eh? Doesn’t seem especially chaotic.”

Vaatu made a disgusted noise in Zuko’s head. _“Raava doesn’t have a monopoly on trust, or friendship, or loyalty. Alliances and friendships can foster either order or chaos, stasis or change.”_

Zuko conveyed the gist of this statement while leaving out most of the irritation. Tulang considered it, then accepted the point with the same _‘makes sense within absurd parameters’_ expression as before.

“Well, if all that’s settled, I still need to examine my patient,” the doctor said briskly.

Zuko obediently sat in his usual spot on the tatami and Tulang sat beside him to conduct his examination, while Shun stayed standing, ready to fetch anything as needed, and Iroh hovered solicitously behind her.

Tulang prodded gently at the newly formed scar on Zuko’s face, asking if anything hurt, how badly, and in what way. “You’ve been using that liniment I gave you?” he asked.

Zuko nodded. Once all the open wounds had been replaced by new skin or scar tissue, and Tulang had been able to take the bandages off, he had given Zuko a little pot of a pale oily concoction that smelled of onions, stale tea, and a hint of piss. He told him to rub it onto the new scars twice a day, to soften them and help with the tightness and itchiness—though it might not do anything to make them less visible, he had warned, his voice softer and kinder than usual. He also instructed Zuko to do exercises to stretch the skin of his face and keep it flexible, gradually increasing in intensity. The usual scowling and shouting ought to do, he’d said with a wink and a short bark of laughter, though take it easy for the first month or so. At that Zuko had scowled, then winced; Tulang’s only comment had been a smug “Hmph.”

The newly formed scars were still tender to the touch, and the constant aching and itching had gotten worse as it got colder, the closer they got to the North Pole; Zuko prayed it would ease again as they headed back south into warmer latitudes. For the past few weeks, though, Tulang’s examinations hadn’t found inflamed spots that felt too hot or were acutely painful when touched—unlikely to betoken actual infection, the doctor said, since there was no longer an open wound, but not impossible if the fragile new skin and scar tissue had torn from excessive movement, especially when it was stretched too tight in the cold.

Once his examination of the scarred-over flesh satisfied him that nothing was dramatically wrong, Tulang did his routine test of the vision and hearing in Zuko’s left eye and ear. He told Zuko to cover his right eye and report what he saw (distinct objects, now, but somewhat dimmer and blurrier than he saw with his right eye). He moved his finger from one side to the other of Zuko’s face and asked him when he lost sight of it, first with only his right eye open (to establish his normal range of peripheral vision), then with his left; it was gradually improving, but still relatively restricted.

Then he tested Zuko’s ability to trace a sound to its location first with his right ear, then with his left: he told him to close his eyes and put a hand over one ear, moved around him and snapped his fingers from one direction or another, and Zuko pointed to where he thought the sound was coming from. With his right ear, the exercise was insultingly easy; with his left, it frightened him how often he was wrong… but Tulang found his performance satisfactory, and again remarked on his gradual improvement before giving him permission to go and resume his normal activities (with his usual admonition not to do anything stupid, provoking another beneficially face-stretching scowl).

“Please don’t say anything to the rest of the crew about why we’re really going to Omashu,” Zuko said to Tulang and Shun before he left.

“Of course,” Shun assured him. “What should we say about it, if they ask?”

“Say I’ve figured out that the Avatar’s earthbending master lived in Omashu, and we hope to find either him or someone who knew him, who might have heard him say something about the Avatar. But of course we have to travel in small numbers, to avoid raising suspicion.”

Tulang shook his head in resigned astonishment. “One day I’ll tell Riu what he actually signed me up for. I look forward to seeing his face on that day…”

Riu was the palace doctor who had treated Zuko after the Agni Kai; he was Tulang’s former student, and had asked his mentor, a retired Navy doctor, to come out of retirement to accompany Zuko on his travels… in truth, to keep him alive during the fragile first weeks of his healing. Tulang had said that he agreed because he owed Riu a favor; neither of them had ever specified what he owed him for, and the way this journey was heading, Zuko suspected that Tulang would end up far overpaying his debt.

“I trust you do not plan to give Riu any hint of this _before_ you are in a position to see his face,” Iroh said delicately.

“You think I’d send a hawk about this?” Tulang asked, his expression incredulous and mildly affronted. “Never mind the risk of it being intercepted; if the boy weren’t there to show he can bend other elements, he’d think _I’d_ gone around the bend.”

“We are grateful for your discretion,” Iroh said with a gracious bow.

“And for your trust,” Zuko added sincerely, bowing as well.

Shun returned their bows and said, “Thank you for trusting _us_.”

A little reluctantly, Tulang gave his somewhat curt, truncated bow as well… mostly, Zuko suspected, because everyone else was doing it.

“I am honored to have this opportunity to aid you, _Avatar_ Zuko,” said Shun with a small proud smile, placing slight emphasis on the honorific title.

Zuko made a face, then winced when his scar pulled. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“What should we call you, then?” Tulang asked, only faintly sardonic. “The Anti-Avatar?”

 _“You **are** an Avatar: the incarnation of an ancient spirit,”_ Vaatu put in.

“Just… Zuko is fine. For now.”

“ _Prince_ Zuko,” Uncle Iroh corrected him. Zuko looked down.

“We can’t exactly call you that while traveling undercover in the Earth Kingdom,” Shun pointed out. “My name won’t stand out, but yours…”

“Oh. Right.” Zuko had thought of that, but it kept getting displaced by other concerns. “Uh… call me Li, I guess? That’s a common name in the Earth Kingdom too, right?”

“I have given some thought to the name I will use in the Earth Kingdom,” Iroh said, stroking his beard portentously. “I have decided to call myself _Mu Xiu_ , which means ‘lover of the good and beautiful.’”

 _Is it just me, or is that really pretentious?_ Zuko thought for Vaatu’s benefit. _And kind of… goofy-sounding?_ His only outward reaction was to shift his eyes to the side.

_“It’s not just you.”_

Tulang sighed. “Can’t I just divide my name into two parts? Does Tu Lang mean anything in the Old Earth Tongue?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Iroh, who knew about these things (Zuko had no idea). “But Tu _Yang_ , written in a certain way, means ‘map of the ocean,’ which seems very appropriate.”

“Fine. I guess I’m a navigator now.”

* * *

Zuko and Iroh conferred with Lieutenant Jee about their plans and determined that the _Wani_ would land as close as it was possible to approach to Omashu without coming into view of the Earth Kingdom naval base at the mouth of the inlet north of the city. The landing party would have to travel some ways overland… but they were prepared for that; they had their false names and cover stories for the benefit of any Earth Kingdom authorities who stopped them, while their true identities would protect them if they encountered Fire Nation forces.

Once they had disembarked, the _Wani_ would sail back to the colony of Yu Dao and wait there… for how long, Zuko could not say.

“How will you reach me when you need to return to the ship?” Jee wanted to know. “A band of Earth Kingdom refugees can’t very well be traveling with a Fire Nation messenger hawk.”

“No, indeed,” Iroh agreed. “Do not worry; we will find a way.”

Jee looked skeptical, and in truth, Zuko was a little uneasy about the matter himself; Iroh would not share everything he knew with Zuko, either.

(“It is safer that way,” his uncle had assured him.

“You’re as bad as Vaatu,” Zuko had groused at him. “I’m sick of old people keeping things from me ‘for my own good.’” He laid deliberate stress on _‘old’_ because he knew it would bother his uncle, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“As difficult as it may be for you to tell, I am _not_ ten thousand years old,” Iroh huffed.)

“And what if there's a problem with the ship or the crew and _I_ need to reach _you?”_ Jee asked.

“Send a hawk to the gatehouse in the wall of Omashu with your message wrapped inside another message,” Iroh instructed him. “The outer message must say: ‘Those who keep to the ancient ways can always find a friend.’ It will get to me.”

At that Jee looked even more intensely skeptical, as did Zuko. “The sentry who reads that message will know that it is meant for my friend, the earthbending master,” was Iroh’s partial explanation.

“How would some random sentry on the wall know that _that_ means the message is for one particular earthbender?” Zuko demanded.

“I am afraid I cannot say more than that,” Iroh said, sounding only faintly regretful about it.

The _Wani_ stopped in Yu Dao, the oldest colony, where the strait through the northwest peninsula met the coast of the Mo Ce Sea. Fire Nation citizens had lived there long enough to intermarry with the Earth Kingdom natives, and the streets were filled with a mix of red and green clothing, sometimes even combined on the same person (more successfully in some cases than others).

Zuko and his companions needed green clothing to blend in among the refugees traveling the roads of the Earth Kingdom, and it was easy enough to find here; the shopkeeper never even asked why they, as people of the Fire Nation, would want it. It posed no problem for their story that their clothes were in the customary style of the northwestern coast; they could say they had fled the Fire Nation’s occupation of the region just south of here, where the locals had not yet been reconciled to Fire Nation rule.

They started wearing their new green clothes around the ship to give them the appearance of age and wear. Soon the whole crew was making a game of quizzing them about their cover stories, which was somewhat annoying, but also, Zuko had to admit, probably helpful. He was asked what character he used to write his name and told that it couldn’t be the same as either of the Ensigns Li, because that would make things unmanageably confusing. He decided his name would mean ‘dawn’, but pointed out that they didn’t have to use the meaning of his name to address him because he wasn’t an ensign: he was either a prince, or in his assumed identity, ‘just Li.’ Somehow that phrase stuck, and he found himself being addressed as Prince Just Li to match Ensign Logic Li and Ensign Power Li.

Their story was that their village on the northwestern coast had been attacked by the Fire Nation, and they had managed to flee the fighting, but Li had been badly burned in the attack and his parents had been killed. His Uncle Muxiu, now his guardian, had run a tea shop in their village (“It's always been a fantasy of mine,” Iroh confessed). Tuyang was a doctor (despite his nautical name) whose practice had been next door to the tea shop; Shun was his apprentice, who had been living with him in the same building where he ran his practice. She didn’t know whether her own family had survived; she had not found either them or their bodies in the aftermath of the attack, and she hoped they had managed to escape. The doctor and his assistant had been able to salvage some of their precious medical supplies before they fled, which had probably saved Li’s life.

It was through one of these playful quizzes from the crew that Zuko realized that none of them other than Tulang and Shun knew how he had been burned. The landing party were rehearsing their story at the unofficial officers’ table at dinner, and Zuko said for the umpteenth time that he (as Li) had been burned by one of the firebending soldiers who killed his parents.

Sub-Lieutenant Somsak interrupted him to ask, “Did you fight back?”—inviting him to flesh out his story, to fill in the details that he would surely recall if it were true.

But as soon as he heard the question, a ringing started in Zuko’s ears (both of them, not just his left) that soon grew loud enough to drown out all other sound; his field of vision narrowed, darkness closing in around the edges. He stood up without a word, without even picking up his dishes to return them to the kitchen, and walked briskly out of the mess hall.

He’d meant to go to his quarters, but a wave of nausea rising in his throat turned his steps instead toward the head. He opened the door to one of the cubicles, knelt on the cold steel floor, and retched what little of dinner he had managed to eat into the hole that emptied into the ocean.

 _“He couldn’t have known,”_ came Vaatu’s deep, gentle voice as Zuko knelt there, cold and shaking, his face wet with tears (just a reflex, he told himself).

 _What?_ he thought back hazily. He spat weakly into the trough in the floor, trying to clear the bitter taste from his mouth.

“He didn’t know the story of the Agni Kai,” said Uncle Iroh’s voice from behind him, on the other side of the cubicle door. He must have figured out where Zuko would go and followed him.

“Does he know now?” Zuko asked dully.

“No,” said Iroh.

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them you still have difficulty with the memory of being injured. Lieutenant Jee said he thought you had been burned in a training accident; I said the story was more complicated than that… but that it was up to you to choose to tell it, or not.”

“They think I’m weak now,” Zuko said with low-burning anger—but the anger was at himself, not his uncle. He shouldn’t have run out like that, should have been able to control himself…

“They think you’re a thirteen-year-old boy who has recently suffered a grievous injury.”

“I’m a prince. I can’t afford to be weak.”

“You are human. It is good for the people of this nation to see that their rulers are human beings.”

Zuko just _hmph_ ed dubiously. He felt too drained to argue about it.

“Come back and finish your dinner,” Uncle Iroh coaxed him.

“I’m not hungry anymore. I think I’ll just go back to my quarters to sleep.”

“As you wish, Prince Zuko.” The weight he placed on the words gave Zuko the feeling that they meant something more.

He hauled himself to his feet and exited the cubicle. His uncle placed a hand on his shoulder for a few silent moments before they walked through the door into the hallway and went their separate ways.

Zuko pushed the door open wearily to find a catopus sprawled on top of the papers strewn over his desk: his maps of the Earth Kingdom and intelligence reports regarding troop positions, his own notes and sketches of possible overland routes to Omashu from various potential safe landing sites. Sushi raised her head when the door opened and blinked sleepily at him, but evidently felt safe and comfortable enough not to try to blend in with her surroundings, because her coat maintained its natural coloring: patches of black and tabby-striped orange, with white on her throat, underbelly, and at the tips of several of her tentapaws.

Zuko sighed. He wasn’t surprised to see her; he had learned by now that the spaces the catopus could fit through were limited only by the size of her dainty beak-snout, and the gap between his cabin door and its frame was definitely wide enough for her. Oh well; he hadn’t really been planning to get any more map work done tonight.

Maybe he should think about packing; they were nearing the inlet that divided lands occupied by the Fire Nation from the lands still controlled by the Earth Kingdom, guarded by a base at the southern lip of the inlet’s mouth. Zuko rummaged in his trunk—still not fully unpacked, after three months; anyway, where else would he put things in his tiny cabin?—for a rucksack that he used for short trips. He had a couple changes of green-and-brown clothes that he’d been cycling through (it was not implausible that, even in the aftermath of an attack, refugees might have been able to gather a few necessities, including a change of clothes). He also had a set of all-black clothing and dark gloves for… covert activities.

The rucksack was long enough to conceal his sheathed dao, and their shape would not be recognizable if they were surrounded by other items: clothing, food, a few simple cooking supplies. At the bottom of the sack, wrapped in the black clothing to protect it, he placed an old theater mask of the Dark Water Spirit from _Love Amongst the Dragons_ that had belonged to his mother. Not even Iroh knew that he had taken it with him into exile; there was no reason to let him know that he was also taking it with him on this shorter journey.

 _“What exactly do you imagine you’re going to do with those?”_ Vaatu asked with ironic amusement.

 _Why are you asking?_ Zuko thought back testily. _You can read my fucking mind._

Vaatu _tsk_ ed. _“There’s no need to be profane.”_

_What you **meant** to say is that you think I’m being ridiculous._

_“I think you’re being… fanciful. Despite what your drama scrolls may lead you to believe, most covert work is **not** done by men in black clothing and masks sneaking around on rooftops with swords. It’s done by unassuming people in unassuming occupations—servants, waiters, tailors, cooks, gardeners—who are just as invisible to their targets as masked men in black… if not more so.”_

_And you know this because… general patterns, again._

_“Yes.”_

Zuko sighed and shoved a rolled-up green shirt into his rucksack more forcefully than necessary… and was greeted by an indignant yowl, claws scrabbling at his hand, and a catopus shooting out of the bag, rapidly changing color as she crossed the room, until she came to a halt in the corner near the door, back in her own black-and-orange coloring, and started vigorously washing herself with an air of indignation. Apparently she had crawled into his luggage while he had been distracted by the argument with Vaatu.

“Damn it, cat…”

_“Now, there’s a natural-born covert operative.”_

“She can’t come with us,” Zuko said out loud… possibly because he felt it would be rude to ‘talk’ about her in her presence in a way that she couldn’t hear.

_“More’s the pity.”_

_You’re a catopus lover?_

_“All cats are my creatures.”_

Zuko considered this. “Is that why they all like to knock things off tables for no reason?” he said, out loud again—and pointedly in Sushi’s direction.

_“Precisely.”_

Zuko put his partially packed rucksack down on the floor— _closing_ it first to discourage stowaways—changed into his sleep clothes, and sat down to meditate. He had been siting there quietly breathing, feeling the pulse of the candle-flames, for about five minutes when he felt the slight pressure of a tentapaw on his leg, then another, then a warm weight settled into the cradle formed by his crossed legs.

Zuko didn’t open his eyes, but he did interrupt his breathing pattern to say, “I’m leaving soon. You shouldn’t get too attached.”

As if in defiant response, Sushi started purring. Vaatu chuckled, adding his soothing vibration to hers.


End file.
